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At 02:26 PM 12/4/2002 -0500, Mike Champion wrote:
>On Wed, 04 Dec 2002 14:13:03 -0500, Jonathan Robie
><jonathan.robie@datadirect- technologies.com> wrote:
>>Can you help me think of an example based on your MS Word scenario that
>>shows how the presence of a data type makes it *harder* for other
>>programs to use the data?
>
>If you mean "data type" in terms of annotating elements with an xsd:type
>attribute saying "by the way, this is an integer|date|float",
>no.
OK, so simple data types don't make this kind of document harder to
understand....
>I was thinking of the whole format as a "data type", and docs
>most usefully thought of as a serialization of the Word object
>model and not very usefully thought of as lexically oriented text.
Clearly, requiring all applications to understand the schema to use this
information would effectively turn it into a proprietary format. I really
want to be able to do queries or extract and reuse data without knowing the
schema.
>A Word document serialized in XML with all the proprietary crap
>encoded is less portable, even with a published schema, than one
>serialized in vanilla tagged text format.
Does the presence or absence of the schema make a difference here, or is
this really an issue of the complexity of the data format being used?
>You wanted a concrete example; it's the best I could come up with
>off the top of my head!
And I think this is an interesting and useful scenario to explore - thanks
for providing this, Mike!
Jonathan
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