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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/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|
