Request for a poll: (was RE: Datatypes vs anarchy)

[Sean McGrath <sean@digitome.com>]

[[Michael Champion]
>While I'm on a rant ... we don't simply have
>"well-formed/valid/schema-valid" layers of XML processing. We have (and this
>is not at all an exhaustive list) well-formed, well-formed-DTD-aware,
>DTD-validating, namespace-aware, namespace-aware-DTD-aware, (but NOT
>namespace-aware-DTD-validating), schema-validating (implies
>namespace-aware), schema-validating-DTD-aware, and (God help us)
>DTD-validating-schema-validating ... Then we have the fact the the InfoSet
>is really just a common vocabulary for implementers, and that the DOM,
>Xpath/XSLT, and XQuery all implement their own flavor of the thing. I'm
>sorry, but I'll bet it would be hard to find a rational person coming in
>from the outside, trying to make sense out of this, who wouldn't use some
>synonym for "entangled" to describe it.

Amen.

You know, I got to wondering last night how XML software developers
out there are dealing with all this stuff. I see nothing but problems
but XML development continues apace. Something is askew!

Sometimes I feel as if we are town arguing about positioning
angels on the head of a pin whilst all around us in the
cities, bulldozers are happily erecting statutes of Gods.

I think it would be interesting to run a poll of the XML developer
community to find out how XML work really gets done
in the real world and what features are really used rather
than just debated on XML-DEV. Questions such as:

Use of validating parsers
Use of namespaces
Use of pipeline processing techniques (e.g. xml in, xml out)
Use of XPath
Use of entity structure
Use of internal document type declaration subsets
Use of notations
Use of DOM levels
Use of SAX1/2
Use of JDOM/Pyxie/etc.
Use of SGML tools e.g. nsgmls
Use of lexical parsing e.g. regular expressions
Use of mixed content
Use of ID/IDREF
etc. etc.

Thoughts?