>Bob Glushko wrote:
>On one end are pure narrative things and on the other end are purely
transactional ones
I've been using the terms
"content-oriented" and "transaction-oriented" myself (they're all documents!
They're all data!), so I was happy to see Bob use the word "transactional" here.
Sean's quantitive approach may have
more of a hard-science appeal than
heuristics we might throw out (text nodes and element nodes as siblings:
content-oriented; data starting or ending up in a DBMS: transaction oriented;
etc.).
Back to tool choice: I've been thinking more
about a potential correspondence between this dichotomy and the XSD/RelaxNG
dichotomy. Look at all the DBMS vendor representatives on the original XSD
Working Group, not to mention the e-commerce types (including a former employee
of Bob's). Rick Jelliffe recently predicted [1] that
XML Schemas 1.1 would be "slightly more DBMS-oriented and
even less publishing-oriented." RelaxNG, on the
other hand, is favored by leading proponents of content
publishing-oriented document types: DocBook, the TEI, and (the W3C's!) XHTML 2.0
working group. Sean has noticed this correspondence as well [2].
Can the
data-DBMS-transactional XML vs. document-content-publishing XML distinction
inform decisions about which schema language, and
hence tools, are more
appropriate for a given system?
Bob
