[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML spec and XSD
Len Bullard wrote: > That's nuts and the opinion of a designer who writes code wonderfully but > very few technical documents of any real complexity. > As a subsystem gets more complex, we need addition levels of 'meta' to make the complexity tractable. So we progress from plain documents to documents with namespaces to documents with content models and facets to documents with the content models and facets organized into types or patterns, and so on. (The current stack of 'meta' currently ends just short of handling versions and variants well IMHO.) So I think there is a requirement for agility: can a developer make an XML subsystem with just the right amount of 'meta' for their project? To oversimplify their positions: Tim is keen that the developer who needs the least amount of 'meta' can have it (with DTD-less XML); Michael is keen on the person who needs quite a lot of meta (with typed information); Len is keen on the developer who needs a bit of 'meta' but not too much (the industrial document developer). I guess I am concerned with developers who need kinds of 'meta' which cannot be productized or packaged well: bespoke 'meta'... But the agility requirement is that it should be relatively easy to go from one level of 'meta' to the next, either up or down, with much less than commensurate effort. I think moving from no-DTD XML to DTD-valid XML is that kind of low effort that allows agility. And moving from DTD to RELAX NG again is agile. But XSD works against agility: first because of its multiplication of concepts, but also because buying into the PSVI can represent a fundamental change in how you process and treat the data: in practice, I think it is the choice between having a flow of documents (XML infoset), or having a DBMS (typed infoset or PSVI.) The PSVI allows and promotes one system architecture (non-XML infoset) and works against others (XML infoset-based flows): so it is not just a neutral way of organizing XML data in any architecture, as you would want if you prized agility. Cheers Rick Jelliffe
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