Re: [xml-dev] The privilege of XML parsing - Data types, binary XML and XMLpipelines (LONG)

["Roger L. Costello" <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Sean,

> 3. Doing so significantly increases the semantic consensus required by
> communicating processes to share data. The beauty of *HAVING* to
> create your own data model[1] from a stream of Unicode with angle
> brackets is that you do not have to share any semantics or
> expectations other than Unicode with the originator of that XML. Far
> from being a burden, it is a *privilege* to be able to parse the XML
> and treat the data the way you want to, rather than have a data model
> imposed on you.

I am not clear on what you are saying.  Consider this:

<aircraft>
    <elevation>12000</elevation>
</aircraft>

Suppose that I create a schema for the aircraft and elevation elements. 
I declare that the elevation element should hold an integer that is
restricted to a range of 0 - 20000.  Thus, the schema is defining a
"data model".  Are you saying that such a data model is bad, that there
should be no such model and it should be up to applications to interpret
the data?  Thus, one application may interpret 12000 as an integer,
another may interpret it as a string, another may interpret it as still
something else?  

Isn't a data model a contract between the sender and the receiver?  If
we have agreed to this contract then we can effectively communicate,
right?  /Roger