xml-dev - RE: interoperability (was Re: Obfuscating XML with namespaces)

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Winer [mailto:dave@userland.com]

>>Those who think it can be done without namespaces and schemas are the ones
putting the ring on their relationships customers

>I think it can be done without XML, after all, until the late 90s there was
>no such thing as XML. 

Obvious troll but what the heck...

In the beginning was the white space. And it was without content. 
until the standards gods breathed on the data and there was ASCII but it 
was without form.  Then came commas, then came round brackets, then came 
curly brackets, then came the pointy bracket, and SGML was good.  Then 
came Berners-Lee to say, but SGML Is Too Hard.  Eat the fruit of HTML 
and all the world will be the same.  You will be as gods and nothing 
that is known will be unknown to you.  Then came the Yahoo and it 
spake, "but it takes too long to find anything in this sameness.  Before 
I know anything, I am as one dead or too bored too care."

And then came XML.  Then came the begattings...

>Somehow my emailer and yours can communicate with each
>other. 

Yep.  But not without a lot of futzing.

>Further, I was able to switch from Eudora to Outlook Express. The
>only problem was that I could never figure out how to move my archives into
>Outlook Express. It's possible that there's a way to do it, and if there
is,
>I'm pretty sure XML wouldn't be involved, and certainly not namespaces or
>schema.

Yep and a big old directory of undiffentiated stuff with heads is about 
as much fun to build with as the legos scattered across my daughter's room. 
They fit together but I have to find the red one with six cylinders and it 
is always in the last place I look for it.

>Another case in point. Up until a few months ago I kept my calendar on a
big
>web portal. It was great because I could access it from the road, and
people
>who work for me could edit my schedule. But one day I went to my calendar
>and it had been wiped out. No past, no future. And I didn't have a copy of
>the calendar, so it was gone, completely. No help from the service
operator.

The days of the file are numbered and no man knows the lifecycle thereof.

>One of these days the users are going to figure out that we, as an
industry,
>did nothing to protect their data.

I came from the earlier age that was using SGML to do 
precisely that because the DoDLords discovered the cost and the misery 
of letting companies that design complexity as a barrier to entry 
own their information.  It was a beautiful thing in the late nineties 
to get ATOS data, run a transform, and load it straight into IADS. 
Egad, it actually works.

>This is the kind of stuff XML should be doing now.
>What are we waiting for?

Waiting? Patience, my a**; I'm gonna write a schema...
... and copyright it!

That'll show 'em.  Nyuk. Nyuk. Nyuk.

len