Re: PSVI

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

Tim Bray wrote:

>
> Of course the great risk in this kind of thinking is that you
> start to believe that in general you have to apply a schema
> before you can start to do useful work with a chunk of XML.
> Another example is from a post here by Andrew Layman from 16
> September 1999:
>
>   Elements defined by a schema, when used in an instance document
>   in a validating processor, will have these default values available,
>   and this fact is pertinent to the author of the document.  This
>   means that an element is incompletely read if the schema for it is
>   not read.
>
> This statement is at the very least controversial.  Are there a
> others around here who would defend this point of view?   I
> apologize if I've quoted Andrew out of context; the words above
> may not represent his feelings, but it is a good example of the
> schema-centric view of reality.  -Tim
>
And just to be clear in regards to my last post I am strongly against
*requiring* any sort of post parse processing before a document is
considered useful. In particular there is an XML 1.0 definition of element
"type" which is distinct from the XML Schema definition of "type".
Interestingly the RDF definition of "type" is much closer to XML 1.0's than
XML Schema, so in particular unless a single coherent definition of type
across all of XML and its associated specs can occur, it is (IMHO) not a
great idea to allow for only a single typing mechanism -- that being said I
*do* think there is much good about XML Schema types, particularly the
ability to define a type as a regexp which is a good thing to do for text
based XML values.

-Jonathan