Re: [xml-dev] ten years later, time to repeat it?

[Robin Berjon <robin@joost.com>]

On Feb 20, 2008, at 17:30, Manos Batsis wrote:
> Robin Berjon wrote:
>> You already have a namespace URI and a local name, why add a type?  
>> I've only ever seen xsi:type used badly. Document-level casting is  
>> silly, really. It's like saying "what this really is is a whale,  
>> that's what it is, but I'm going to call it a lemur, just because.  
>> I think someone said I could only have lemurs. Yeah it's a lemur;  
>> a humongous, blubbery water lemur."
>
> You dug this one right out of your siglist didn't you?

Not even :)

> True, the expanded name is all one needs to look up the  
> documentation and figure out the actual type manually, but a schema  
> is used to automate the plumbing for validation or, say,  
> deserializing XML to objects or whatnot.

I can understand the occasional need for typing, sure, but the  
expanded name should be all you need to look up the type definition  
in a schema. In other words, the expanded name *is* the type name. If  
you want the element in that position in your language to potentially  
be a whale or a lemur, then have the schema offer <whale> and  
<lemur>, not some hack with xsi:type. This is one part that IMHO DTDs  
got right.

--
Robin Berjon
........................................................................
"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."
                         -- William Gibson