Re: [xml-dev] Caught napping!

[Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@propylon.com>]

[Tim Bray]
>As I've said before,
>
>1. the only normative definitions of XML, and of Namespaces,
>    operate almost completely at a syntactic level.
>2. I've been in software for 20 years and I've seen lots
>    of interoperable cross-platform syntax and very rarely
>    an interoperable cross-platform data structure or API.
>
>Obviously, once you're dealing with some XML inside of
>a program, you think in terms of the structure.  But XML's
>interoperability is strongly linked to the fact that
>its definition is syntactic.  -Tim

Tim,

This sure reads well but, gee, I'm up to my tonsils in
XML interoperability problems and I'm supposed to
be a specialist in this stuff! Heaven help non-specialist
John Q. Webhacker out there.

I'd sure like to investigate the possibility that XML's lack
of a data-model is a fundamental source of my problems.
Anything is better than standing still where I currently
am, spinning my wheels with interopability
problems.

Consider this: we have people like Joe English - hardly a neophyte
to XML - on this list saying it is such a drag
to get get parsers to *find* DTDs that he just
uses them for documentation[1].

If Joe has concluded he is better off without DTDs
what hope for the rest of use.

Consider this: this week and last, I have spent most of my
waking houses trying to get one industry leading
standards compliant XML editor to edit XML in
a form that will not cause a standards compliant
Browser to choke or display crud on the
screen.

Really simple stuff. Or should be!

In my experience, put any two XML apps
together and you have an integration problem. Any
XML systems I've built or seen that do not have
interoperability problems just use start-tags, end-tags
attribute values and PCDATA. Monastic XML.
Anything else is a nightmare.

As for namespaces, don't get me started on namespaces!

Could some of the people who find XML interoperability
a complete walk in the park please send their
CVs to me immediately? I'm on the verge
of concluding that I'm too old for this, or to stupid
or both.

I hate to spoil the party folks but while we are
fiddling with internal document
type declaration subsets on this list, I fear
that all around us, Rome burns.

</Rant>

-- Rant does not have a start-tag because this is a streaming
mode e-mail :-)


[1]
http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200111/msg00309.html