Re: [xml-dev] Should an XML vocabulary be a Swiss Army Knife or a dedica

[Frank Manola <fmanola@acm.org>]

On Feb 16, 2009, at 6:53 PM, Michael Kay wrote:

>> When you think in terms of "creating" XML vocabularies for
>> these business process using either approach, I hope you're
>> imagining that a lot of this "creating" will in fact be
>> "stealing", i.e., that you're not planning to reinvent
>> vocabulary for things like customer names and addresses,
>> invoices, and all sorts of stuff that every business in the
>> world needs to use
>
> There is a danger of course that if you use a vocabulary that is  
> rich enough
> to meet the needs of every business in the world, then you are  
> taking on
> board far more complexity than your particular business needs or can
> reasonably afford. This is usually far more than just a few extra  
> fields
> which you don't have to use if you don't want them. You can put the  
> customer
> name in a single element <customerName>, or you can implement a 500- 
> page
> spec that ensures you will be able to capture every nuance of  
> international
> naming, including British royalty and Russian patronyms just as  
> tasters.

True.  But the folks that did implement that 500-page spec for  
customerName (and hypothetically a similarly-complex spec for every  
other field in an average customer-relationship situation) probably  
went broke a while ago, so you won't have to interoperate with them  
anyway.  Hopefully there's a happy medium.

>
>
> (I bought a piece of furniture yesterday and noticed that the sales  
> order
> entry allowed a choice of dozens of different titles, from "Dr" to  
> "Lt Col".
> But could they handle Prof Sir John Smith? Probably not. Will they  
> lose
> business as a result? Almost certainly not.)

But can they interoperate with FedEx?

Cheers,

--Frank

>
>
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
>