Re: [xml-dev] How to design XML to have broad utility and yet alsoenable

[John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 10:06 PM, Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au> wrote:

John will certainly remember the old-school data sgml modelers, who said "just model the data", i.e. ignore any usage or application constraints.

Actually, I knew zip about markup until 1998.  I just pretend to be an old fart in this community. 

But i think the onus needs to be on content architects who develop new intermediate formats to demonstrate that it represent the shortest distance between the inputs and outputs. (Or has some other hard non-theoretical benefit otherwise.) 

Well, the obvious one is that of being a bus format, so that instead of N * M conversions in your enterprise, you need only N + M.  In that case, the format may be *completely* different from any of the inputs or outputs, as it needs to be comprehensive for all of them (and others as yet unthought-of). 

(I was sacked from a job once for suggesting that extended html would suffice, in the 90s.)

I whispered that more quietly and smiled when I said it, so I kept my job.  Sometimes, people use <quote> and <para> and <emph> just so nobody can say they're doing HTML. 

When I was doing sales engineering in an earlier life, I ran onto this on the client side.

Client: We want an XML feed.

Me: Our HTML feed is well-formed XML, so you can just use that.

Client:  No, no, you don't understand.  It has to be an *XML* feed.

Me: It *is* an XML feed.

Client:  ...

Me: ....

 

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