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RE: bohemians, gentry

• To: 'Jeff Lowery' <jlowery@s...>
• Subject: RE: bohemians, gentry
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 13:35:32 -0600
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

Saying it is "just politics" is maybe belittling. 
It is need and that is always a local politic. 
The problem is a local politic going global at 
the point of the standards sword. 

We said we wanted standards, told everyone 
that was the only way the web could work,
embraced that the line best worn would be 
the W3C line, and made household names of 
the tailors, but come time to cut on the dotted line, 
we don't all really want to wear the same 
ones.  Normal is as normal does, yes? What did 
Megginson say:

"...what matters is what people actually do, not 
what spec writers invent or marketing departments 
announce support for."  Of course, someone 
claiming to do SAX that renames all of the 
API calls might get a different answer.

Back when we were first proposing SGML to the 
PDES crowd, at the end of a long day, they 
concluded that the SGML type would be TEXT 
and that was it.  Just a text string.  
Most of the PDES community considered that 
too weak for a real document type and said so. 
It turns out several years and many changes 
of sides later, TEXT is as meta as meta gets.

So this discussion, or class warfare, has 
gone on for a long time in markup.  It comes 
down to truly what is the least amount 
of agreement required to get the most 
work done without consultation.   Syntax 
and bits on the wire seem to be it.  After 
that, it is all special case pleading.

I don't object to datatypes.  It is useful 
to know what the intent (as in RULE) of the 
sender is because I don't want to explore 
a space by extension (enumeration).  
That doesn't mean I have to 
follow the RULEs, but I might.  At the end of 
the day, shy of infoset applications, 
XML is just TEXT but woe unto the one 
who does not read well the BNF or 
tenderly care for the codepoints.

len


From: Jeff Lowery [mailto:jlowery@s...]

So let's see if I understand this:

Are XML datatypes core technology? No.

Are XML datatypes useful under certain contexts? Certainly.

Can the support and transport of datatype information impose a burden in
contexts where datatypes are not useful? Of course.

Therefore: 
Datatype support should be modular. 

Datatypes should not creep into core Recs. 

In contexts where datatypes are not useful, there should be a mechanism to
toss away or filter out datatype noise.  (I suppose the same could be said
for namespaces, as well, or any other meta-meta-tag info.)

So why is this class warfare and not merely an argument for good software
design?

Politics?  Mmmm... could be.

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