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At 05:23 PM 4/24/2002 -0400, Mike Champion wrote:
>That is clearly not what the Schema,
>Query, or Semantic Web working groups are doing. "Purely academic" is
>not a reasonable
>description for the W3C's focus these days, but neither is a desciption
>that does not reflect
>its newer aspirations to push the boundaries of Web/XML technology.
I'm glad you agree that Schema and Query are not purely academic.
Perhaps you would also agree that many vendors need a schema language that
supports types, and many vendors need a query language that corresponds to
the schema language for XML. I don't think anybody would see that as
"purely academic" - perhaps we could even agree on "purely practical". If
we wait for the industry to develop it, then smaller companies are very
limited in their ability to innovate in these areas, because customers are
*very* reluctant to adopt proprietary schema languages or query languages.
Suppose you want to develop a native XML database. If you use XML Schema as
your schema language and XQuery as your query language, your customers can
do an awful lot using nothing that is at all proprietary. If you have to
wait for Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle to each develop their own proprietary
languages and fight it out in the market, then smaller, innovative
companies really lose out, because at that point these companies have
established not only what languages will be used, but which products have
dominance. And vendor lock-in has occurred.
The same holds for web services.
Frankly, I continue to be surprised by the extent to which you campaign
against these standards, since adopting these standards is a hallmark of
your company's marketing materials, and when I worked at Software AG,
adoption of XML Schema and XQuery was considered extremely important. Has
that changed?
Jonathan
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