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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: bohemians, gentry
 At 01:56 PM 12/4/2002 -0500, Mike Champion wrote: >On Wed, 04 Dec 2002 13:11:03 -0500, Jonathan Robie ><jonathan.robie@datadirect- technologies.com> wrote: >> >>But all data has a lexical representation, whether or not it also has a >>data type. I still do not understand why the presence of a data type >>makes it harder to take advantage of the lexical representation. I know >>that a lot of people on this list believe that it does - and vehemently >>believe that it does. > >Think of the "HTML" produced by MS Word, and (at least from reports here) >the XML that the next version of Word will produce when one does >a Save as XML (one tag per word, perhaps, probably lots of attributes with >numeric values that make no sense without detailed documentation). Certainly you can create schemas that are hard to understand without detailed documentation. But I would think that datatypes would make it *easier* to understand data, not harder. For instance, if the schema makes it plain that something is to be interpreted as a date, that makes it easier to reverse engineer the data. Can you help me think of an example based on your MS Word scenario that shows how the presence of a data type makes it *harder* for other programs to use the data? >Of course, one *could* just use the lexical representation, write DOM or >XSLT code to put it into a more usable form, blah blah blah. But on the >other hand, how many >people are going to do this? How does the presence of a data type make this harder, easier, more necessary, or less necessary? Can you give me a concrete example? >It is essentially a serialization of the Word object >model, using a complex and very strongly typed schema, and the path of >least resistance by far is to use Word to edit the stuff. >(Which, ahem, is probably the whole point). An editor for Word documents probably will be tightly coupled to the data format. Other applications will not be - for instance, ad-hoc queries can be issued against a serialized Word document using a generic XQuery processor. Again, the presence or absence of data types seems pretty neutral here. Jonathan 
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