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Re: Bad Design? An XML Schema that forces applications tomaint

• From: Norm Tovey-Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>
• To: Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Tue, 07 Feb 2023 08:39:48 +0000

Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> writes:
> In other words, the XML Schema forces applications to maintain state. 
>
> Isn't that really, really bad?
>
> Imagine trying to map this battlefield message data format to some
> other battlefield data format. You would have to do state-dependent
> mapping. Ugh! That's awful! Right?

Maybe. It really depends on the context. If this is a format used by
historians to describe battles and the expectation is that entire
campaigns will be in a single file then not forcing the user to repeat
something is possibly a useful feature. The value you want is always on
a preceding sibling anyway.

Even in a modern context where the messages are being used to describe
an ongoing conflict, if they’re routinely sent in small batches, it
might be advantageous to save space by allowing later messages in the
same batch have state implicit from earlier messages.

If they’re being sent wholly independently over UDP then, yeah, that
seems bad.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norman Tovey-Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>
https://nwalsh.com/

> Our years, our debts, and our enemies are always more numerous than we
> imagine.--Charles Nodier

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• References:
  • Bad Design? An XML Schema that forces applications to maintain state
    • From: Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>