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At 02:33 PM 2/15/2003 +0000, Sean McGrath wrote:
>A direction perhaps best addressed by revisiting ASN.1 or Corba or
>something - not botching XML.
With respect, ASN.1 and Corba are precisely the kind of thing that many
dataheads were running away from when they turned to XML. Regardless, I
don't think anyone is going to be able to stop people from using XML for
data, or from wanting datatypes for their XML.
>What doc-heads object to is the peripheralisation of *documents* so
>starkly evidenced by the brutish intraveneous injection of "data speak"
>into the core of the XML 'stack' from certain quarters.
>
>It did not have to go into the core, did not have to be so invasive. Its
>really, really sad that it was allowed to, thus tilting the whole balance
>of the XML "vision" violently in one direction.
I think you are probably complaining mainly about W3C XML Schema, which is
not, incidentally, part of the XML Core, and is still not even mentioned in
the XML spec per se. I don't think DTDs are going to die any time soon.
There's some hope that simpler schema languages like RELAX-NG may also gain
some market share, but that's clearly not the direction the major vendors
are pursuing. A smaller, simpler W3C XML Schema, with a careful redesign
that allows incompatibilities with W3C XML Schema 1.0, would be a very good
thing.
Curiously, there seems to be much more interest in using XML for documents
in mainstream companies than there was when I was working for companies
trying to cater specifically to the structured document market. Now that
XML and Internet technologies are mainstream, many companies are a lot less
afraid of using them for their documents. Since so many SGML/XML document
management companies have had major problems getting anyone to pay for
their products, I think this is a very good thing for the XML document world.
Jonathan
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