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At 02:59 PM 12/4/2002 -0500, Mike Champion wrote:
>On Wed, 04 Dec 2002 14:40:49 -0500, Jonathan Robie
><jonathan.robie@datadirect- technologies.com> wrote:
>
>>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?
>
>The difference is in the mindset, which is why this discussion is so hard
>to pin
>down. If the XML is thought of as a serialized object of some type
>the use of the XML becomes constrained by that type. If the XML is
>thought of as some text that has useful information that different
>applications may use as they see fit, you
>lose that constraint ... but of course have to do more work to convey
>or infer the "useful information" because the schema tool won't do it
>for you.
But the beauty of XML is that you are allowed to use either mindset - the
same data may be treated as well-formed XML or as strongly typed XML,
depending on the software you use to process it. Of course, datatypes also
impose constraints on what is allowed - and you should use them only when
you really intend those constraints. But constraints are important for some
applications.
So I think it would be easy to construct lots of concrete examples that
simply use the wrong datatype and hence prevent perfectly legitimate
information to be written, but they would be artificial, not practical
examples. I'm still fishing around for the concrete examples....
Jonathan
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