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

["Robert C. Lyons" <boblyons@unidex.com>]

Matt writes:
> Let me get this straight. I have the following document:
>
> <foo>
> 	<value>45.67</value>
> </foo>
>
> What you are saying is that someone might want to treat "value" directly
as
> something other than a floating point number? I can easily see how this
> element could be transformed into a boolean (e.g. greater than 30) for
> display, or into an integer (e.g. through truncation) for some other
> processing. But surely the original value in the original document is
always
> a real number, right? If not, I'd appreciate a more concrete example. I'm
> not sure whether I get it.

Here's an example that I've encountered more than
once:

<foo>
    <value>20010312T143213</value>
</foo>

For the sender, the value element contains a batch ID
that uniquely identifies a batch of transactions.
The sender happens to use a timestamp as the batch ID,
even though the value element may contain any
string that uniquely identifies the batch.

For the receiver, the value element contains the
date and time when the message was created. The
receiver is not interested in batch IDs, but is
interested in the creation date and time.

Best regards,

Bob

<sig name    = 'Bob Lyons'
     title   = 'E-Commerce Consultant'
     company = 'Unidex, Inc.'
     phone   = '+1-732-975-9877'
     email   = 'boblyons@unidex.com'
     url     = 'http://www.unidex.com/'
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