RE: Personal reply to Edd Dumbill's XML Hack Article wrt W3C XML Schema

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

At 05:32 PM 3/12/01 +0100, Matthew Gertner wrote:
>Element types have specific semantics that don't very across instances. I
>would have thought that this would be one of the few universally accepted
>truths in the XML world (wishful thinking, I guess). Specifying data types
>in the instance for convenience runs directly counter to this. [...]
>
>Are people truly attracted to this idea, or is it just an exaggerated
>response to the admittedly frustrating warts on the XML Schema spec?

I'm coming more and more to the opinion that the only semantics which 
matter in the end are the semantics seen by the recipient of the message.

There may be times when prior sender-recipient communications have more or 
less established those, and there are lots of times when the recipient 
wants to make the sender happy (typically $$$$ at stake), but I don't think 
there's anything fundamental about XML, XML Schema, or any other related 
technology which counters that case.

Schemas are really useful for a wide variety of processing, but I'd 
strongly encourage people to treat them as an aid to processing rather than 
a magic wand for establishing communications.


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books