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All I care about is that we remain true to the underlying semantics of the
document. The more semantic information we have to work with, the more cool
things we can do, as I know from concrete experience.
If a document represents a set of data, then it should be typed as such
because this information is useful. If it represents a book, then that's a
whole other ball of wax. I agree that seeing the dates in a technical book
as string types rather than date types makes perfect sense, to the extent
that the information is there only to be presented to a human reader. If the
document represents an invoice, it is impossible for me to imagine an
elegant processing app using Perl to do string manipulation rather than
seeing the document as an object with properties associated with the
appropriate data types.
So we agree. If what Simon and others are talking about is also book-type
documents, then I totally understand the aversion to strongly-typed XML
schema (although I still think that the objections would be far less
significant if XSD were simpler).
Matt
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:ricko@allette.com.au]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 07, 2002 7:04 PM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] XPath 1.5? (was RE: [xml-dev] typing
> and markup)
>
>
> From: "Matthew Gertner" <matthew.gertner@schemantix.com>
>
> > I can
> > certainly say from my experience programming in Java and
> C++ that I would
> > prefer for a number to be a number and for a date to be a
> date, rather than
> > having to constantly convert back and forth.
>
> Say I am maintaining and growing a large document set, of
> technical books. Can I use XML Schemas dates to describe my
> dates? The chances are slim. So XML Schemas creates a
> requirement for conversion in order to use it fully. Or,
> more likely, people maintaining existing document systems
> will only use the datatyping of XML Schemas very loosely, and
> roll their eyes at all the parts that are extraneous to them.
>
> You seem to be assuming the documents are created from out of some
> DBMS. For publishing users, that is rarely the case. (Of course, some
> people mix and match.)
>
> Cheers
> Rick Jelliffe
>
>
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