RE: Enlightenment via avoiding the T-word

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Which is why I asked earlier about points of 
view on these subjects depending on implementation 
background.  The namespace utility's usefulness 
has a lot to do with the system in which it is
used.  Again, surface syntax doesn't tell one 
enough about the properties of the *system*. 
That is why the groves people spent their 
time working out a way to find and map invariants.

On mapping relational databases:  declare all 
of the fields as globals and find out how much 
name grunge is in your legacy system.  Declare 
them locally (children in elements whose names 
ARE the tablenames), and you hide all of that.  
Use the ODBC connection of XML Spy to the 
relational database and see how it represents 
what it gets.

What you do about it depends on how much system code 
you are willing to rewrite and that depends on 
who else is using the schema.  But gad, there is a 
lot of grunge in almost any legacy table design 
and you have to track a bunch of people down to 
find out if it is real or just grunge.


Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com]

Hmm, I'm not willing to go nearly as far as Rick.  But he's done
a good job of pointing out that overloading names in a single
markup vocabulary does have a real cost, and one you should 
worry about (and I found it instructive that in the RDBMS world, 
ERWIN raises a flag on this).

On the other hand, when I'm writing O-O software, when I pick
variable and method names I don't worry very much about whether 
they clash with locals elsewhere.  Hold, on that's not true: if 
you're building a class in Java, you'd better not have a toString() 
method that launches missiles :)... but it's certainly a different 
style of thinking.

There's scope for a nice general essay here about the 
differences between ways of thinking about data; basic WF XML, 
OOP, and RDBMS represent instructively different thought 
patterns.  PSVI and DTDs and SOAP and so on fit into this 
pattern in interesting ways.  -Tim