Cart
|
[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Not using mixed content? Then don't use XML
 On 3/25/13 9:06 PM, Simon St.Laurent wrote: > (Rarer even than the schema-free respondents to this and related > threads, whose presence I've been excited to discover.) > > Here's another: in the last 10-15 years of working w/XML (mostly from publishers), we've almost entirely avoided schema, and although many (most) of the documents we've received have had DTDs associated, when possible we've ignored them. The only time we absolutely had to learn about schema was when dealing with SOAP. We have schema-lovers in our office, too: they tend to be the people looking for someone to blame when things go wrong - they want to have some way of knowing whose fault is it when something fails. That's valid, but isn't really a helpful perspective for a creative problem-solver. I've often looked at schemas and DTDs as a potentially useful guide to a new data format (documentation), and to some extent they can be. But we often find that they fail in two ways: On the one hand the industry-standard, widely-used, schemas have usually been defined so broadly that they encompass a huge amount of possible markup that may never be encountered in (our) practice. This makes them useless as constraints on development since the cost of "support" for an entire schema is never really warranted. So we can't really leverage existing schemas easily, since we still end up having to analyze the actual corpus in order to understand which subset of the markup is used in practice, and this varies wildly from customer to customer. And on the other hand, schemas (and certainly DTDs), for all of their expressive power, often fail to capture the variety of interpretations given to markup. I'm reminded of the customer that really wanted to put call-outs containing primary source document fragments inline in a document, but didn't have any appropriate tag defined in the DTD for that purpose. Rather than simply being free to invent one, they choose to abuse the footnote tag for the purpose and added some completely unrelated convention to distinguish these structures from traditional footnotes. Having become accustomed to this convention, they went on to invent other uses for footnotes as well - marketing blurbs went in there, too IIRC. I'm sure markup abuse like this goes on all the time, and I think the slavish adherence to standards is partly to blame. -Mike Sokolov 
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] |
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! 
Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|
|||||||||
