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

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

And Len (live but incompletely formed) and 
Lewis (still dead but completely well-formed) 
probably agree.

The difficulty is knowing when a Value among a set of 
values is to be a floating point value without doing a 
lot of rules or other kinds of processing to work that 
out *For Every Instance of the The Same Kind of Document*. 
Nodes are local but they receive lots of different values 
and it is a good thing to know when one arrives just how 
to cast it.  It is also nice to do that sooner rather than 
later in some cases.

The Schema appears to be an easy way to do that.  The nice 
thing about the name having meaning is that the egg has 
to be handled delicately or the maintenance costs of 
Kings' Men and Horses goes up.  A priori agreements citable 
by some public citation are rather good for that.  Leaving it to 
"programmer's discretion" in all cases is usually a really 
bad idea.  Simple looks good until you have to put the 
egg back together again and the only instructions you 
have are the crease angles in the breakage.

The issue is whether or not PSVI is required in every 
case.  Certainly Humpty Dumpty is allowed to be the 
Master of his own fall but not his reconstruction. 
Otherwise, all the king's horse and all the king's 
men might fail and the king can't afford that.

Record of authority governance of the transaction 
ensures the cost is commensurate with the means.

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

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


-----Original Message-----
From: W. E. Perry [mailto:wperry@fiduciary.com]
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2001 1:28 PM
To: XML DEV
Subject: Re: Personal reply to Edd Dumbill's XML Hack Article wrt W3C
XML Schema


"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:

> 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.

With all deference to Len Bullard and Lewis Carroll:  in the end this must
be
so because the recipient has the obligation to make some use of the message.
The only use which he can predictably make is one for which he is locally
capable. Even if the message arrives burdened with data schemata, content
models and canonical semantics which the recipient has pledged to honor, in
the
end he must instantiate the 'true' data, or semantics, or meaning of the
message as whatever it is that he is specifically capable of using,
presumably
by processing it to some locally meaningful outcome. I am merely suggesting
that the recipient be permitted to proceed directly from the XML syntax as
received to the locally meaningful instantiation of locally useful data, by
whatever means are locally at his disposal.