Re: Namespaces, W3C XML Schema (was Re: ANN: SAX FiltersforNamespaceProcessing)

[Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>]

From: "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>


> At 10:25 PM -0700 8/21/01, Ronald Bourret wrote:
> >Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> >
> >> I am concerned that the theoretical use of schemas for typing is
> >> overriding their practical use for constraint checking.
> >
> >The use isn't theoretical. Witness all the products that generate
> >classes from XML Schemas.
> >
> 
> And witness all the people using these products NOT. I classify this stuff along with tree-based XML editors and binary variants of XML as something that gets reinvented several times a month without any actual market demand. 

The popularity of the tree-based interface to XML editing is perplexing, given that tree views are quite cumbersome to use for documents with more than a handful of elements at any significant 
level. For "data" documents, the order is usually not so important, so being able to move
branches around is not important; for prose documents, you normally cannot see enough of
the data content to make much use. 

I suspect it is just that Java/VB/C++ have convenient widgets 
for tree-views, so programmers think "oh that is good".  If the desire is to allow some kind
of outlining, but that is to little avail if other word processing features are missing. And, there
is a good proportion of the world which still uses 15" monitors or notebooks: they just cannot spare the screen real estate for any clutter.


Cheers
Rick Jelliffe