Re: [xml-dev] Wikipedia on XML

[Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 09:25, <rjelliffe@allette.com.au> wrote:
>>> XML has no effective conditional text system.

I'm starting to wonder why this is an argument for anything. Neither
does YAML, or JSON, HTML or MARC or any other markup / structured
language, and yet they are all still useful. I'm a bit suspicious of
your use of "*text* system" (my emphasis) and question why the markup
language in itself should have this. Isn't this why we *have* XSLT?

...

>> XSLT uses version number! If needed, a version number can always
>> be introduced at the application level. Same namespace, new version
>> number - and the application figures it out.
>
> Rubbish. That does not work in the case of a breaking change.

Of course it does, if you want it to. We're talking about ways of
making it work, not how specifics failed in that attempt.

> We have had exactly this issue in OOXML. We wanted to reform the datatypes
> for numbers and so on. But spreadsheet vendors (not Micrsoft) complained
> that because there was no lexical distinction and because their software
> was written "robustly" so it would not fail when there were unusual
> attributes or elements, the existing code base would accept the new format
> without generating an error, but it would be misinterpreting it.

But you're here talking about versioning as an after-thought in order
to fix legacy problems. If the versioning model was in place from the
get go, perhaps this would have worked perfectly. I myself use a
similar scheme, and it works for rather large and complex systems that
use XML as a pipeline language.

> So in this situation, the only weapon XML gives us is to either change the
> element names or to change the namespace. So in OOXML Strict will be
> taking a new namespace.

I'm not sure why XML *should* help you. It's markup, not a protocol.

...

> In XML, we don't pay attention to these issues because we cannot.

Or because we should not?


Regards,

Alex
-- 
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