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Re: When is an XML vocabulary too complex? The art andscience

• From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2012 20:34:58 +0000

 >If an XML vocabulary is large and complex, does that mean it's bad?

The world is large and complex.

If you have a large and complex XML vocabulary, it might be a symptom 
that you've bitten off too large a problem and you should tackle 
something smaller. Or it might be a symptom that you've failed to find 
the right levels of abstraction. (Though I think some XML vocabularies - 
XBRL and HL7 come to mind - suffer from being too abstract.) In general 
though, it might just indicate that you're tackling a large and complex 
problem.

It would be a brave person who claimed that GML is too large and 
complex, for example. Given the problem they have chosen to tackle, 
which bits would you leave out?

Michael Kay
Saxonica

• References:
  • When is an XML vocabulary too complex? The art and science ofcreating large, complex vocabularies that are amenable to teaching,learning, and using.
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>