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At 11:06 AM 6/11/2002 -0400, Mike Champion wrote:
>Hmmmmm ... ya pays yer money
If you have to.
> and ya takes yer choice:
Yep, though I think you're missing a lot of options in this list.
>You can:
>
>- Have some input-time code (or post-input cleanup code) that normalizes
>values so that they can be effectively processed as strings, such as
>converting natural language, locale-specific dates into ISO (or some
>other) format that allows them to be sorted and compared as strings ...
>
>- Use a schema, schema-processor, and schema-aware sorting/comparison
>tools such as XPath 2 or XQuery to process the XML as typed values rather
>than strings ...
>
>- Live with the fact that 1.00 != 1, and 20020611 != June 11, 2002, ad
>nauseum.
>
>For my money, normalizing the values can solve many of the problems that
>strongly typed schema languages are supposed to solve, but often more
>simply/cheaply/portably/etc.
Normalizing is a wonderful thing if you're entering information once and
will always have the tools around if you need to change it. It's a real
straitjacket if you take XML's textual flexibility seriously and don't want
to lock yourself into a particular set of tools. W3C XML Schema, of
course, combines the requirement for normalized lexical forms with an
oddball set of types, which is worse.
><RagOnSimon> You don't like schemas, you don't like GUIs, you don't like
>bloated applications ... how DO you handle these problems? </RagOnSimon> :~)
I'm a text-editor kind of guy who writes SAX filters. That solves a lot
for me. I'm actually working on a GUI as part of MOE, but it's pretty
embryonic right now. If I had more time, I'd try to solve more problems...
Simon St.Laurent
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue
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