xml-dev - Re: Handheld computers

[Matthew Gertner <matthew@praxis.cz>]

Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
> The point here is that standards define minimal interoperabilityt.
> The more standards you have to implement for interoperability, the
> bigger the problem (i.e. you would be creating an XML that was really
> an aggregate of XML+XLink+Xpointer+<whatever>), and that would be
> bigger and harder than XML 1.0.

Where is the interoperability if there are five different ways to do the
same thing? There is strong consensus in the software development world
that adding complexity in layers makes more sense than implementing it
monolithically. There might be a case for keeping ID and IDREF, for
example, as a minimal mechanism for linking inside a document, but many
of the features of XML (notably entities) are pretty complex in their
own right. An architecture that does away with these, significantly
reducing the complexity of implementing "vanilla" XML, and requires
implementation of (say) an additional XLink layer for applications that
need to create references between documents, would seem to me to provide
more, not less interoperability.

Matthew

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