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At 14:49 06/06/2004, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>At 12:56 PM +0100 6/6/04, Dave Pawson wrote:
>This response demonstrates yet another common fallacy in software design.
>There are unexamined principles at the foundation of your question which
>are so deeply ingrained in your thinking that it doesn't occur to you that
>they need to be examined or justified, but they do.
Sheesh, you read minds too?
>The fallacy here is that a document has some sort of processing
>expectation, but this is simply not true in the heterogeneous world of the
>Internet.
Maybe not in your world. It is in mine.
>The document is what it is, and will be processed differently by different
>actors. I likely do not want to do the same thing with the same document
>as you do, nor is it necessary that I do so. The demand that we provide
>and adhere to schemas is often little more than a demand that we process
>documents in only certain preapproved ways. That is a fundamentally
>limited perspective.
Business often finds that useful. I don't call that limited.
>You are assuming that the extensions must be processed because they're there.
You're reading my mind again I see.
> I disagree. If I don't need them, I am free to ignore them. My only
> concern is whether the document contains what I need in order to perform
> my task. You likely have different requirements for that document than I
> do. I do not guess how to handle anything. I take what I need, and ignore
> the rest.
And what form of schema validation do you use to ensure that what you
need is there?
>>>Sometimes the answer, is "I don't know" and the document may need to be
>>>kicked to a human for further analysis.
>>
>>Which some might equate to 'fall over and die'?
>
>Absolutely not. The fact is computers aren't that smart, and robust
>systems allow and prepare for human intervention. In practice, most
>debugged and deployed systems rarely require human intervention of this sort.
I've not met many such perfect systems.
>>I think the SGML world got it right on this one.
>
>As proven by the massive success of SGML, and the complete failure of XML. :-)
Bit of a leap there?
DaveP.
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