Interoperability

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 08:12 AM 14/11/01 +0000, Sean McGrath wrote:
>This sure reads well but, gee, I'm up to my tonsils in
>XML interoperability 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].
...
>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.

Well, our experiences differ.  When I get into problems
with exchanging XML, they fall into two categories:

(a) what they sent me isn't well formed [sub-case: what I
    sent them wasn't well-formed :)]
(b) we disagree on how many XXX's can be in a YYY

I usually manage to solve (a) by saying it "Open it up
in IE... see, it's not XML".  With the authority of Redmond
behind me, they tend to see the point.

(b) is a business problem and has nothing to do with
technology.  We'll never make that one go away.

What kind of problems do you run across?

As to Joe's problems above, I tend to think that one of
the best uses of a DTD is for documentation.  I find them
laughably inadequate for some parts of business validation
and real overkill for others - I just don't find much
use for them at interchange time.  Having said all that,
the spec is clear, you have to provide a SYSTEM identifier
for your DTD, i.e. a URL... why is this hard?  -Tim