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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Robie [mailto:jonathan.robie@softwareag.com]
> Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2001 7:40 PM
> To: Paul T; Champion, Mike; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] W3C's five new XQuery/Xpath2 working drafts -
> Still missing Updates
>
> >Bringing types to XML, ( based on 'it looks like' ) would bring
> >plenty of madness.
>
> "it looks like" is precisely what I consider error prone. The
> cure for "it looks like" is to record what "it is" in the schema. And
> that's why we need types.
As my Two Poles post hopefully makes clear, I think you two are talking past
each other. Jonathan has quite persuasively argued that there are good
technical advantages to be gained from designing strongly typed XML
applications. I think Paul is implying that these technical advantages
require a business environment that is not typical of the world most of us
live in. Some subset of us lives in an engineering-centric world where
strongly typed applications and schemas are designed by competent people,
they run on compatible systems, and business processes to cope with
validation failure and schema evolution are put in place. Some other subset
of us lives in a world where business processes are
sales/marketing/administration-centric, there's lots of incompatibility
among the systems the apps must run on, and engineers have to cope as best
they can without EVER telling a customer "you need to send a schema-valid
purchase order before we'll take your money". Most of us probably muddle
along in an environment where everyone tries to do the right thing, but
there's usually a big gap between what is technically desirable and what is
economically or bureaucratically possible.
Perhaps we could move forward on the "types vs. update" debate by asking
what percentage of likely XQuery users could use a) strong typing features
and b) INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE features in real applications in the next two
years.
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