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We're seeing increased interest and some of it is coming
in the form of Schemas, not interest in schemas.
There are efforts in legal systems, other justice
systems, and in message formats national and state
to state communications. We also have a conservative
user base, but one with international problems.
Given we use relational technology, Schemas are a
straightforward way to get certain jobs done.
I found XML Spy with it's ODBC utility to be
good for getting the job started. After that,
one begins to discover the problems in the
original source table definitions and XML Schema
plus a tool is good for outing those. Automagic
only goes so far.
I admit freely that our uninitiated with oop backgrounds
ignore schemas until it is too late. The instance
fragment I posted the other day is an example of
what can happen. XML is very flexible and that
can be a wonderful and terrible thing given the passion
to rush to coding out of an eight hour introductory class.
With regards to MS XML documentation: it appears that
MS uses a lot of automation to organize its site. That's
just a guess. Because MS has created and used or discarded
a lot of technologies, it can be difficult to sort out which
one applies when to a particular problem. Also, while
Terrarium and the like are fascinating (the use of
ecosystem metaphors for web services: whoda guessed),
MS needs to spend the time and money to re-organize its
XML documentation and training assets into one that leads
the user skillfully through the learning curve. It does this
well in parts (eg, the project series types), but this is
all scattered about. Sometime should be spent refocusing and
planning a coherent presentation, and possibly retiring some of the
older articles. The reference material is generally good,
the problem reports useful, etc., but the smooth entry from
newbie to guru, not so smooth.
No more FatMSBooksDoomedToBeDoorstopsInSixMonths.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Brennan [mailto:Michael_Brennan@Allegis.com]
I have no hard statistics, but given that we are finding that our customer
base is showing interest in XML Schema, and our customer base represents a
somewhat conservative (with respect to technology) segment of the market, I
would say that the speculative claim of about 1% of users using XML Schema
is extremly dubious -- and even those not currently using XML Schema often
have plans to start using it. If I were to extrapolate from our customer
base, I would put the estimate at closer to the 10-20% range and growing.
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