Re: Picking the Tools -- Marrying processing models to data models

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

On 24 May 2001 01:08:31 +0100, Al Snell wrote:
> The label, however, is really identified by the namespace declaration more
> than the XML elements. You could drop the element/attribute names and use
> numbers, and have the schema/DTD/informal spec explain what each number
> means, and the XML would be no less expressive (the same information would
> be there, albeit now more oriented towards machine processing than human
> processing).

Please keep in mind that there are a lot of people who find XML useful
precisely because information is maintained in a deliberately
human-accessible format.  

Calling numbers "no less expressive" may be true if you think in turns
of numbers, but is cold comfort for employees facing lists of
unidentified SKUs, programmers attempting to figure out what their
long-gone predecessors were up to, and documentation writers who have
the pleasure of describing that format for the ages.

I still remember that peek(-16384) was the means of reading keystrokes
on an Apple II, but I kept a reference card around for all the rest.