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It isn't that uncommon to start from instances and
tag sprinkle. Somewhere in some fashion, someone
had to document the results. They could do that
with samples, which is a weak way, or write a DTD
which is formal but can have the side effect of freezing
a design early in a form that looks more authoritative
than it has to be, or just do the typical table of
names and descriptions. I encourage a DTD because it is
a lot easier to read and understand than trolling
tediously through long examples looking for patterns
and exceptions.
Given a very large set, the use of the DTD and parser
to repeatedly test the set, find exceptions, make changes
to the DTD or call in the experts to determine if the
exceptions are significant seems more productive than
tag sprinkling.
The part that is more troubling to me when sprinkling
is coming up with naming conventions that are easy to
read, resource friendly, and which most of the players
can agree to as useful for all of the processes the data
will be a part of.
len
From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com]
Many on this list will find it shocking, but lots of important XML
dialects don't have any DTDs or schemas. Particularly in the
application-glue space. People email back and forth some examples, they
cut some code, and then everything's working and they're too busy to go
back and write a schema.
In fact, I am at this very moment working on a proposal to do some data
mapping of a big information pool that can generate XML output, they
just sent us some sample instances, seemed to do the job.
I don't 100% approve of doing it this way, but that doesn't stop people
doing it, and (at least sometimes) getting good results. -Tim
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