[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: RELAX NG Marketing (was RE: Do Names Matt er?)
One use case for default attribute or element values: An application configuration file in the form of an XML document offers advantages of flexibility, robustness in the face of version upgrades to an installation, extensibility, basic error-handling support, basic low-level validation of the configuration information. Such a configuration file may contain information appropriate to a whole range of uses and levels of configurability, that might be manipulated by several different people filling different roles. For example, there might be elements and attributes which control the severity level and verbosity of log entries, locations where the database and naming servers might be found, communications modes for distributed processes (CORBA vs. COM or HTTP), directories where log files go. These might be the province of system administrators. There might also be information specifying some kind of database metadata which told the application how to extract the data it needed from the using organization's relational database (e.g., views which provide the necessary results). This might be the province of some kind of business unit IT administrator. There might be information about scheduled activities (backups, logfile cleanups) relevant to the application. There might be information about which features of the application would be enabled or disabled. There might be security settings. There might be specifications of custom extensions, or user programs that would be invoked by some features of the application. Some of this information is meant to be edited by users, and some is normally not supposed to be edited, but might be changed by the vendor or under the direction of the vendor's customer support office to help diagnose a problem with the software. In many cases, the producer of the configuration instance document does not know enough about the meaning of a given setting to be expected to insert the setting as a required item. Default values for many of the settings in such a file provide these benefits: 1. If the installation is upgraded (or downgraded) to a different version, the defaults can change correspondingly (in the configuration file's DTD or schema) without affecting the hand-edited settings. The replacement installation can come with a different DTD or schema, but the configuration file itself can be unchanged. 2. The vendor can send out a new DTD or schema changing default values for features that were not approved for certain classes of usage (for instance, certain high-security usage) when the software was released, but since had been certified or otherwise vetted. 3. When the default values are the ones that are right or reasonable for normal operation, the people configuring the application can avoid having to know about them, while they are still configurable without having to touch the application code and can be inspected in the schema or DTD. Jeff ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Brennan" <Michael_Brennan@A...> To: "'Matthew Gertner'" <matthew.gertner@s...>; <xml-dev@l...> Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 1:31 PM Subject: RE: RELAX NG Marketing (was RE: Do Names Matt er?) > > From: Matthew Gertner [mailto:matthew.gertner@s...] > > <snip/> > > >...Or > > do you think that the whole idea of element defaulting is misguided? > > .... Honestly, what is the > use case for software (or a user) to be able to put an empty tag in the > document and have the value defaulted rather than just explicitly put the > intended value into the document? This simply shifts a burden from the > producer of a document to the consumer of the document; a producer can > *force* a consumer to have to construct a PSVI (or have a hard-coded > equivalent in application code) in order to reliably interpret the infoset > of a document. If the default value is intended, why is it an unacceptable > burden for the producer to just put the intended value in the document?
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