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John Atchley wrote :
>That said, I think "extensibility" is a more important attribute than
>"self-describing." I see flexibility as XML's greatest strength -
>ironically it seems that many of the "advances" in related fields serve
>mostly to constrain or destroy that flexibility by burdening XML with
>validation info that more rightfully should be in the
>application domain.
You're right, but I think that trying to deal with the extensibility problem
on the data format side only is bound to fail. I don't know of a way to
achieve true schema extensibility which does not require to modify each and
every program that use it (unless you schema extensibility is of a very
simple kind, like replacing a 1..5 occurence count by 1..*). The simplest
solution to this problem seems to allow the association between a schema and
some behaviour, but this gets very political (see my previous post about
embedding code within schemas).
If think that there are plenty of other problems to gnaw before coping with
the complex problem of extensibility, and that may be the reason why there
are so few "advances" towards flexibility, and so much efforts to reduce
flexibility in schemas, so that they become effectively processable.
Regards,
Nicolas Lehuen
http://nicolas.lehuen.com/
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