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tolerating anarchy (was Re: Personal reply)
- From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- To: "David E. Cleary" <davec@progress.com>, XML DEV <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
- Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 10:36:42 -0500
At 08:41 AM 3/13/01 -0500, David E. Cleary wrote:
>And this is supossedly a good thing? That a producer of the data and the
>consumer of the data can disagree about what the data means? I'll take
>data typing any day over anarchy.
It's something we deal with every day in real life, even in
computing. (Having been to the UK recently, I'm surprised that we call
these languages 'English'.) How much anarchy can your systems tolerate?
I'd suggest that anarchy is a lot of why the Web succeeded and previous
approaches failed. Seems to be a matter of balancing structure and chaos,
not banishing disagreements.
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