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Re: XML doesn't deserve its "X".

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: XML doesn't deserve its "X".
• From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
• Date: Tue, 05 Mar 2002 14:50:58 +0100
• References: <B8AA8959.231E%KlausBackert@c...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.8) Gecko/20020214

Klaus Backert wrote:

>>If you also mean the ability to include new information in an existing
>>vocabulary, I think that XML has failed so far
> 
> Including new information into an existing vocabulary (= inserting character
> data into an XML-document, which is built according to a problem-specific
> language - do you mean this?) is part of my job (doing it by editor and by
> own applications). No problems with this too. Could you specify how XML has
> failed, please?

That's the easy part :=) (meaning no offense)

What's difficult is to extend it without having to predict what the 
needs will be (and where the document will have to be extended) and 
that's unfortunately the real challenge for real life open world 
applications.

<snippet-from-another-answer>
Let's take a simple example... I have a text only element:

<ns1:foo>This is a simple example.</ns1:foo>

If I extend this example to include a semantic element to identify
"simple" as an adjective:

<ns1:foo>This is a <ns2:adj>simple</ns2:adj> example.</ns1:foo>

I am changing a text leaf node into a mixed content including 2 text
nodes separated by a child element and this will likely break 90+% of
the existing applications.

The situation is probably better if you want to add an element in an
elements only content model, but even in this case, if you take real
life applications, how many of them will you break? 30%, 50%, 75% ? Way
too many in any case!
</snippet-from-another-answer>

Eric
-- 
See you in Seattle.
                                        http://knowledgetechnologies.net/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
http://xsltunit.org      http://4xt.org           http://examplotron.org
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