Re: Reflecting on a decade of XML

[=?utf-8?Q?Jean-Marie_Gouarn=C3=A9?= <jean-marie.gouarne@arsaperta.com>]

----- "Willaim F. Clare III" <billclare3@yahoo.com> a écrit :
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  In one sentence – an early flurry of unreconciled objectives have missed fundamental simplifications, and, perhaps, the process has mired in details.  


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  So here - a holiday grab bag of comments on objectives and simplifications, including base capabilities for:

·          separating “what is” specifications from “how to” model implementations

·         foundations for a uniform syntax separate from semantics

·         separating application data from specification data

·         separating markup from other data.

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More basically, the lack of preliminary conceptual data modeling was, up to now, one of the major causes of defects.

The (probably erroneous) discrimination between structured and so-called "unstructured" data, and the more or less conscious filing of XML in the unstructured side, installed a disastrous cultural break between the XML ecosystem and the old-style, database-oriented data modeling techniques, that is more familiar with the distinction between the "what" and the "how".

As a consequence, a lot of XML-related issues used (and use) to be discussed without  preliminary shared premises on the basis of, say, documented UML class diagrams or so, and the markup takes precedence over the business meaning.