At 3:11 PM -0400 6/6/04, John Cowan wrote:
>Walter Perry, are you listening? Your Fichte has been found!
I have no idea who Fichte is/was, or what his/her relevance is here,
but I freely admit I learned a lot of this from Walter. Like a lot
of developers, I didn't believe it at first since it was so contrary
to everything I had been taught, and Walter was challenging
assumptions I hadn't even realized I was making. But eventually it
became clear that Walter was basically correct, once I actually
started trying tom justify those assumptions, and once I started
writing code to Walter's principles and saw that they worked.
I don't agree with Walter 100%. I do find schemas to be occasionally
useful tools for documentation and diagnosis. However, I do think
that schemas should not be seen as strait jackets, outside the
boundaries of which there be dragons. waiting to eat the unwary. I've
just had too much success working with schemaless and even
consciouslly invalid documents.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
