Re: breaking up?

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

from Simon St.Laurent:
> On 06 Aug 2001 15:25:49 +0100, Leigh Dodds wrote:
> > > Sort of a document-says-it-all vs. infoset-says-it-all breakdown,
> > > complicated by other divides (document/data, object/RDBMS/document,
> > > etc.).
> > 
> > Are you suggesting that these are orthogonal divides? I'm not sure 
> > that they are, and wonder whether document vs. infoset is actually 
> > document vs. data, just in a slightly different guise.
>
> I used to think that data folks gravitated toward the Infoset, but it
> doesn't seem to be that simple. 

Actually I guess I'm not sure I see what the issue is with the notion
of infosets.  "The" infoset (draft, still) isn't what I want it to be (since
it still includes "lexical noise", which for better or worse I attribute
to its DOM support), but it's still not what I think "data folk" need
(they need a richer typing model, and concluded that DTDs don't
offer the right toolset).

I'd agree there's a kind of complexity horizon.  Like a black hole
(of ink? :), there are some XML-labeled things that, one you cross
over their line, seem to take you into another world where you can
no longer see the (simpler) world you came from.


>     I've talked with a few too many data
> people who find the layers built on top of XML 1.0 to be excessively
> complex to believe that statement works generally any more. ...
> 
> In some of the cases they were shuttling information between dissimilar
> systems with wildly varying levels of support for schemas of any flavor,
> and found that their expectations based on the stories of what schema
> will do were just plain wrong. (I wrote some of those stories myself, of
> course.)

Building on that analogy, perhaps the XML Universe has more than
one black hole, and W3C schemas are just one big one?  :)

- Dave