Re: [xml-dev] DTDs, W3C Schemas, RELAX NG, Schematron?

["W. E. Perry" <wperry@fiduciary.com>]

"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:

> It is why I say "there ain't no web; just parts and assemblies".  Usually when
> someone disputes that assertion, the arguments come down to locus of authority
> to define scope for a system, and typically, they mean "all of the sharable
> information space as declared in URIs and governed by the W3C".
>
> It ain't happening.  That definition is screwed for all practical purposes by
> the requirements on the local implementor.   They might want to ramp back to
> something more workable and less ambitious.

I may be (the last?) naive true believer, but I am at least rational enough to
verify as well as trust. Yes, Virginia, there is a Web, consisting of all those
who will address one another with URIs while accepting that the responses they
might get were created in a different value space where different semantics
prevail. The opportunity is arbitrage which, on the whole over the past seven
centuries, has been the single most efficient model for wealth creation whether
you want to define wealth as money or as knowledge. I take from you what you
will export, stated in the terms of your locale and, of necessity, your
semantics. I instantiate it, or some parts of it, anew in my locale and in the
semantic terms which are my local advantage. I refactor it into components you
you would likely never have imagined, precisely because my expertise includes
knowing where I can ship those parts onward, to others who will instantiate them
locally to their own particular advantage.

If I were to begin by requiring you to have my understanding of your product, we
would likely never have the first interchange. My interest in the larger
mechanism is to preserve that possibility of the first blind and tentative
correspondence precisely because that will furnish the basis for my next profit.
The internetwork topology is the (at least potentially) worldwide framework
which enables those interchanges. Developing its full potential means using its
full range of possibilities, not constraining them to the small club who might
be willing to agree on some limited 'value space' a priori.

Respectfully,

Walter Perry