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Nor should an application be forbidden to tightly couple
using XML. An application can't require this of
of XML. The choice should be made based on the requirements
of the application. So why the controversy over what is
the most basic and easily understood aspects of markup
and markup systems?
It all comes down to one's interpretation of "What Is XML?"
Those who religiously, politically, or ambitiously lump
XML application frameworks into "requirements for XML"
do a disservice and commit a technical blunder. Teaching
this in the universities is an academic conceit.
XML core is simply XML 1.0: FULL STOP. Not,
XSLT, not XSD, not namespaces, not RELAX NG,
not .NET, and certainly not SVG, XHTML, and so forth.
As long as that core remains untouched, all of the debates
on loose and tight coupling, schemas, strong typing vs
lexical and structural named types, are simply and
only choices of the application engineer. While in
the context of designing an application, it can be
convenient to blur these distinctions, at the strictest
levels of definition, the following hold:
o Element != object
o Attribute != field
o Elements and attributes are not rows and columns
o Namespaces are just flags
o XML systems != The Web
o The Web != The Internet
XSLT is an application language. XHTML is an application
language. SVG is an application language. .NET is an
application framework. The Web is a system of systems
for assigning, persisting and resolving identity properties
to representations of entities known as resources.
These are easy ideas made complicated by the insistence
that the WWW become an application framework evermore
tightly bound to interlocking specifications to meet the
requirements of blind interoperability for systems
that identify and retrieve resource representations.
Understand clearly that these are not requirements of XML;
XML is an enabler for these requirements, not their source.
Do what you will with these, but the originator
is responsible for selling ideas and systems, and
the term "sell" is deliberate. Don't consider
the work a "standard" until it is adopted as such,
and then remember that the social behavior of adopting
standards is predicated on willingness based on perceived
value, not the source. Technical groupies are this
century's most pathetic beings.
len
From: Eric van der Vlist [mailto:vdv@dyomedea.com]
If you don't want to read yet another rant against *imposing* type
annotation in XML please delete...
Thinking again and again on what's the difference between loosely and
tightly coupled systems and how this apply to XML...
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