[Simon St.Laurent]
>
> I know that information modeling is hard - no question about that. Is
> expressing information models in XML really _this_ hard, though? Or is
> it just that people don't value taking the effort?
>
It IS hard, no doubt about it. Many on this list will have seen that I've
written the same thing many times.
> The relational database people, whatever their other sins, did an
> excellent job expressing things like normalization approaches.
> Object-oriented programming has school after school battling out these
> issues and best to accomplish particular information representations and
> processing. XML seems to have left all this to the wind.
>
It's like all those miserable Access databases that people cobble together.
It's not really Access's fault except that the product makes it relatively
easy to do a really bad job. On the other hand, normalization and good
design are most important for data updates , where you care about data
integrity, and for maintenance of the database, where you care about
understanding it. Otherwise, skill in denormalizing for performance is more
important.
There's a lot more reading than writing going on in xml-ized data. Look at
XQuery, which isn't ready to deal with updates and deletes and won't be for
who knows how long.
> These are kind of Saturday-afternoonish thoughts, but I'm really
> wondering whether a lot of the confusion around XML (and some of the
> hideous results we're seeing) comes from a lack of discussion - and
> tools built around the results of those discussions.
>
Good practices for markup data and documents? Maybe design patterns would
be closer to the mark? Sounds pretty valuable.
Cheers,
Tom P
