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Ghosts don’t speak unless spoken to.
Schemas/DTDs shine in environments where the generators are humans who are lazy, forgetful and/or badly trained. At my last job of the 12 people working for me, only 1 could read a DTD and all claimed to be XML experts in an application with a large and well-crafted DTD. Being the only other person on the hall who could, it was in no way job security nor did it broker data goodness. They doggedly tagged 1500 work packages to the wrong part of the tree because the style sheet didn’t care, the customer didn’t look, and the files validated and ran in the system they were targeted to.
Contracts have to care. If they don’t then the humans won’t.
len
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How come Len Bullard doesn't kick in? This is so much about control.
On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 12:48 AM, Michael Sokolov <msokolov@safaribooksonline.com> wrote: On 4/9/13 5:20 PM, Simon St.Laurent wrote: On 4/9/13 5:16 PM, Toby Considine wrote: Sorry
Might be interesting as a straw man. I only
became aware of this piece of work at its tail end (years after any attempt at
standardization was abandoned, I think), when I guided some agonized engineers
through an implementation of a soap service in perl that was supposed to
provide services to a Microsoft .NET consumer: these two software packages used
completely antagonistic approaches, as far as I could tell. The
"standards" were worse than useless; they should have been called web
services inoperability. There are at least two, maybe three completely
different interpretations of the SOAP vocabulary based on fundamentally different
conceptions of how to deliver web services, all masquerading under the same
heading of WS-I. There are layers of incomprehensible service endpoint
babbledygook that makes reading the actual markup nearly impossible: it might
as well be a binary format for all the benefit one gets from XML in this arena.
The current situation is that the only rational way to use SOAP is to use two
endpoints from the same provider, and never ever to look under the covers at
the XML that is being generated for you. At least that's how it seemed to
me as an infrequent user - I don't claim to be an expert. This particular
piece of software is the tar baby of our organization - touch it at your peril.
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