"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
> With XML, any single program can pretty much duck those issues, and
> interchange and reuse when it matters. XML's flexibility makes it
> possible to take a number of different answers on the interchange angle,
> and easy reuse doesn't seem to be an exciting enough problem for
> developers to notice.
I do suspect that reuse isn't much of an issue. In document-centric XML,
I suspect people will tend towards languages such as DocBook and reuse
will be about the same as it is with word-processing documents today.
That is, you need to worry more about what goes into each document
rather than the format of the document itself. (Do I separate out at the
chapter level? The section level? etc.) Reuse in the document-centric
world is quite likely just cut and paste.
In the data-centric world, reuse is likely going to be done through
something like XQuery, which allows you to rearrange whatever it is you
want to reuse. That means that, unless the format is entirely silly, you
can probably massage it into what you want. (The same can be said of
relational database design as well, with the penalties in both cases not
being whether something is possible, but how well it performs.)
-- Ron
