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RE: modeling, validating and documenting an xml grammar

• To: 'Joe English' <jenglish@f...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: modeling, validating and documenting an xml grammar
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 08:06:26 -0500

One does not always model the general case as in the 
examples of polysomy, six digit hands, etc.  One may 
be modeling a case for which the restrictions are known 
in advance and accounted for by ensuring the occurrences 
reflect that closed understanding.

What is the real world this side of an MTV program and 
just how much editing goes on to make the narrative 
purpose of the director work?  The appeals to the general 
case don't fly in the face of 'real world' engineering 
because it is not always required or useful to model 
the general case.

I grant that in more cases than not, leaving the max 
occurrences infinite works, but wasn't the lack of 
being able to model a finite set one of the precise 
reasons for critiqueing DTD modeling?

One thing I was thinking of driving home with 
respect to relational systems:  is it typical 
or even very useful to model the relational 
tables themselves (a trivial excercise) or 
to model views and message/documents that may 
be created from table sources?  IMO, and a 
bit myopic, XML remains a document model for 
its widest set of applications.  Would you agree 
that in document models, setting occurrence 
constraints to precise limits is useful or common?

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe English [mailto:jenglish@f...]

OK, let me rephrase that: what are the real-world use cases
of minOccurs and maxOccurs _in XML vocabulary definitions_?

And I'm somewhat suspicious of the above examples, too.
I have a friend with eight grandparents.  Some people have
six or more digits per hand.  Polysomy is not at all infrequent.
You'd need to consult the Guinness Book of World Records to
determine a suitable value for maxOccurs if you were for
some strange reason writing a schema that modeled any of the above
as elements.

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