RE: is that a fork in the road?

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

Who is offering what indigestible chunk? 

Henry?  He is saying what the best and brightest 
said before him and since:  we are getting a 
complex mess because we didn't have a robust 
data model to begin with.  Which part of that 
is unreal?   All I am asking which I think 
may be at the heart of this is do we have 
to loop back into the base infoSet to fix 
things.  The pipeline metaphor can be 
seen as a series of infosets, each one 
different but building on what came before. 
Is that the idea?  If the idea is to remove 
the bedrock of well-formedness, only the 
bits on the wire have to right to begin with, 
then I agree.  At the bottom of this, all 
one gets is a well-formed character string. 
That won't be enough for some applications. 
The rounds in VRML proved it to me.  Justin 
makes it clear as Marrin did before him 
that type information is a REQUIREMENT for 
these apps to interoperate blindly.  

If you are talking about XML Query, the 
jury is out on that.  I can see the sense 
of it from a perspective of how relational 
guys like to write queries.  I can see some 
giant overlaps with XPath and the expressions. 
I also see Jonathan saying over and over that 
both spec owners are working on a convergence 
to avoid messiness.  And I see them reiterating 
what Henry says so clearly:  without a data model 
it only gets worse from here.

So I am really missing your point.  Change seems 
inevitable.  Will it be ad hoc or planned?

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com]

Really?  Whose follow-on requirements?  And why does that require 
fundamental change to the original "job" that may seriously injure those of 
us whose requirements were met quite well already?

Why drive the "follow-on" stuff so deeply into specs those of us with 
simpler needs may have to use?

That minimal victory "bites" a digestible chunk, rather than the huge and 
dense mass currently offered for universal consumption.