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grimlinda@earthlink.net (Linda Grimaldi) writes:
>I agree with you, Simon- it's a good, pragmatic approach. However, I
>wonder what happened to the old promise of XML a la Mr. Goldfarb- to
>remove the distinction between docs and data.
Speaking philosophically, I think Goldfarb's vision is an excellent one,
well-worth keeping in mind. In practical terms, I think we're going to
see more of an iterative process reaching that vision. I keep finding
that the people telling me that the distinction has fallen already tend
to be the people selling me things (functionality, tools, etc.) I don't
want.
>In many cases, it's not a viable vision, perhaps- and I never was very
>sure why I'd want to treat my data like a doc anyway. Markup does give
>me the ability to extract data from my docs, which is probably more to
>the point.
I think there's probably going to be some kind of convergence over time.
I worry a lot that we've had too many proclamations that "XML solves the
document/data divide", or that "XML schema solves the document/data
divide". We're not nearly there yet, and it's clear that different
groups of people have different priorities.
YAML seems like a great experiment to me, offering people who care
primarily about the data a chance to work with the benefits of a textual
format in a context that's still general but attempts to solve a lot
smaller problem set.
I think we have a lot more experiments ahead of us before the
distinctions fade. In the meantime, we have a lot of great stuff too.
XML has made a lot of things easy that used to be difficult, notably the
extraction case you mention.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org
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