Typing and paranoia

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

I agree with those who feel that some applications of XML work just fine 
without any requirement from ancillary typing machinery, and that such 
machinery shouldn't be compulsory, and XPath/XQuery would be immensely 
better if the basic and schema-dependent parts were cleanly separated.

There's really not too much paranoia-fuel in that complex of issues 
though.  What really scares me is the recurring theme that we ought to 
re-frame XML as a data model and treat the syntax as just one 
serialization.  That makes me seriously paranoid - if somebody promises 
me XML, I want a stream of unicode characters with angle-brackets, not 
some fragile opaque binary kludge which is advertised as having infoset 
semantics  -Tim