xml-dev - Re: Foreign Names

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 09:57 AM 4/18/00 -0500, Paul Prescod wrote:
>That's fine for the problem of linguistic translations but isn't there a
>bigger problem wherein organizations of all sorts need also to
>manipulate the underlying structure to normalize different views of the
>same information? 
>[...]
>This is a superset of the foreign name translation problem. Independent
>invention makes it harder to solve, but not fundamentally different.
>
>To put dollar signs in your eyes, consider the problem that occurs when
>Compaq and DEC merge and need to integrate their XML-based information
>systems. It's the same problem and now two billion dollar companies need
>a solution.

So if we treat Compaq and DEC as speaking foreign lanuguages...

>In my opinion this is the largest open question in XML practice. I think
>that the XML world is new enough that people don't understand that true
>schema "standardization" is neither possible nor desirable.

This is the best quote I've seen describing XML schema standardization's
problems in a nutshell.

>Architectural forms, schema subtypes, RDF subtypes and XSLT all point
>towards solutions but none are perfect. XSLT is the closest in that it
>is the most flexible and it is link-aware (as archforms and schema
>subtype are not) but it has a lot of weaknesses also.
>
>I can see the utility of a simple renaming syntax but I think that it is
>at least as important to focus on the much larger problem of independent
>invention and unification.

I worry about this part of your message a lot.  I'm not sure that I'm
willing to give up the prospect of a small solution that addresses
translation issues in favor of "we've got these enormous generic tools that
all suck but they're trying to solve bigger problems so they must be better."

In particular, I see tools in all of these as tools rather than
infrastructures, though there's a range.  AF is the most
infrastructure-like, while XSLT is most about creating tools.  All of those
options seem far too large, indeed ungainly, for the problem set proposed.

I'd like to think - and still belive - that there's a practical solution
out there that doesn't try to fix every problem with schemas yet can get us
out of the perpetual battle of foreign names, be they i18n or merely
corporate.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

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