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On Sunday 27 January 2002 06:30 pm, Paul Prescod wrote:
> > ... Nobody but a
> > handful of mega-corps will be able to get away with saying "if you
> > want to do business with us, you need to use our schemata."
>
> Of course. But if we presume that there are third party schemata for
> these sort of things then how is requring conformance to them any
> different than requiring XML well-formedness or Unicode
> well-formedness or conformance to the IP RFC? It is precisely the
> small companies who cannot afford to try to write software that is
> "approximately correct." First, there is the difficulty of writing
> such software (cf. the implementation of a legacy HTML parser).
> Second, there is the risk in misinterpreting a document and blowing
> a budget on building/shipping a product the customer really didn't
> want and won't pay for.
The reality is that often the little guy foots the bill. A good example is EDI, where a few major buyers dictate the exact EDI formats that suppliers are to use. My neighbour uses EDI as a competitive advantage in his business, and it costs him a lot of money to maintain the feed.
That said, I always thought the whole value of XML-EDI was to make it *easier* for the smaller players... and I believe this to still be possible. I don't think you'll ever remove the dictatorial nature of business though.
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