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   Re: [xml-dev] Elliotte Rusty Harold on Web Services

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At 8:49 PM -0500 2/2/03, Mike Champion wrote:


>In the current situation compliant XML tools can validate a SOAP 
>message against the relevant schemata, but a SOAP-compliant 
>processor will reject it if it has a DTD (external declaration or 
>internal subset), a PI, etc. The issue on the table, as I understand 
>it, is whether the "XML" world (broadly defined) is better off with 
>the status quo or in a world where some "profile" is established 
>whereby "XML" tools can be either optimized for the profile, or put 
>into "profile mode" where they would flag as errors the use of 
>constructs not in the profile.

Profile mode I can live with it provided it's off by default (though 
it's still a very bad idea, and I will tell developers that using it 
means there systems are wrongly designed). I can't accept parsers 
that by default reject legal XML documents, or that cannot even be 
configured to accept them.

><religious-analogy-beaten-into-the-ground> IMHO, It's time for 
>ecumenicalism, not fundamentalism ... time to welcome innovators 
>into the mainstream rather than driving them out as heretics ... 
>time to accept the fact that XML is continually evolving from what 
>survives in the real world, not invented by an omniscient Creator. 
></religious-analogy-beaten-into-the- ground>

If people want to invent or evolve something that's not XML, go right 
ahead. But please stop calling it XML! Those of us who have to teach 
and explain this stuff (and have taught and explained similar topics 
in the past) have learned from brutal experience that the confusion 
this approach engenders has massive, real-world costs in developer 
time and productivity, though these aren't the sorts of costs that 
can be measured by benchmarking code execution time.

Java did not call itself C. That was a good thing, though it was 
clearly an evolution of C. It survived on its own merits, not by 
fooling developers into thinking it was just some weird form of C. 
The various alternative markup languages people are inventing based 
on their experience with XML should have their own names too, and 
should stand or fall based on their own merits, not by falsely 
claiming to be something they're not.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|           Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava             |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+




 

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