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Re: bohemians, gentry

• To: Mike Champion <mc@x...>,XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: bohemians, gentry
• From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>
• Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 14:40:49 -0500
• In-reply-to: <oprgwaykwhezizxn@localhost>
• References: <5.1.0.14.0.20021204124927.02325108@n...><5.1.0.14.0.20021204130721.03be8fe8@n...><5.1.0.14.0.20021204140505.02d11ec8@n...>

At 02:26 PM 12/4/2002 -0500, Mike Champion wrote:
>On Wed, 04 Dec 2002 14:13:03 -0500, Jonathan Robie 
><jonathan.robie@datadirect- technologies.com> wrote:

>>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?
>
>If you mean "data type" in terms of annotating elements with an xsd:type 
>attribute saying "by the way, this is an integer|date|float",
>no.

OK, so simple data types don't make this kind of document harder to 
understand....

>I was thinking of the whole format as a "data type", and docs
>most usefully thought of as a serialization of the Word object
>model and not very usefully thought of as lexically oriented text.

Clearly, requiring all applications to understand the schema to use this 
information would effectively turn it into a proprietary format. I really 
want to be able to do queries or extract and reuse data without knowing the 
schema.

>A Word document serialized in XML with all the proprietary crap
>encoded is less portable, even with a published schema, than one
>serialized in vanilla tagged text format.

Does the presence or absence of the schema make a difference here, or is 
this really an issue of the complexity of the data format being used?

>You wanted a concrete example; it's the best I could come up with
>off the top of my head!

And I think this is an interesting and useful scenario to explore - thanks 
for providing this, Mike!

Jonathan

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