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I use rtf control and dir/file finds. DTDs are fine if I don’t have to write them. I don’t mind designing them but all of the problems that couldn’t be resolved in design were humans in the loop.
Evil is being told “I don’t pay you to program. I pay you to do XML” by someone who isn’t paying you well and doesn’t “do” XML either. Stupid is not immediately looking for another job. Stuck is having to do that wearing a surgical mask.
len
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One of my favorite
idioms, which I would like more people to adopt, is that attributes and
elements have equivalence, to the extent that makes sense. In other
words, if you only have one of a sub element/attribute, and it is just a
string, then you can express it as an attribute. Or put it as an element
if you like. I built parsing this into my very concise and mostly
complete SAX/DOM-like/mini-XPath Ssx parser: get("age/type") will
find '<age type="years">', although you can still do
get("age@type"). Let's just use LISP. Then we can reclaim our Dark Overlord PriesthoodRobes and demand unusually high salaries for being slightlybetter-trained than data entry clerks because clerks can't cooder intheir cars. Xerox tried this long ago, Roger. It failed pretty badly. The problem with attributes is not syntax or lack of utility. It isthat they become a metadata junkyard where information is stuffed thatis rarely used and almost always ignored in templates. They are oftenunder-documented particularly where they are used by only a fewcorner-case applications. Here is an example. Guess how many of theseare being used often, how many are generated, duplicate items foundelsewhere or are a result of using one DTD to govern non-local processes(same entity being processed by multiple systems serially): wpno ID #REQUIREDcrewmember CDATA #IMPLIEDtocentry (2 | 3 | 4 | 5 ) '2'date-time-stamp (date | time | date-time ) #IMPLIEDframe (yes | no ) 'yes'army (yes | no ) 'no'airforce (yes | no ) 'no'navy (yes | no ) 'no'marines (yes | no ) 'no'fgc CDATA #IMPLIEDlsa-id CDATA #IMPLIEDwpseq CDATA #IMPLIEDinsertwp CDATA #IMPLIEDdeletewp (yes | no ) 'no'delchlvl CDATA #IMPLIEDcomment CDATA #IMPLIEDchangeref IDREFS #IMPLIEDidref IDREFS #IMPLIEDassocfig IDREFS #IMPLIEDskilltrk CDATA #IMPLIEDsecurity (uc | fouo | c | s | ts ) #IMPLIED There is a well-understood impedance mismatch between XML andObjects-What-We-Love and between SQL tables yet humans seem to be ableto handle them well and understand what they are. They are in thissense, a design problem for people who don't understand thesubject-matter or process space with enough clarity to apply them well. len _______________________________________________________________________ XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASISto support XML implementation and development. To minimizespam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@lists.xml.orgsubscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@lists.xml.orgList archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php
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