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Re: XML Schemas and docbook documents


/ Yann Dirson <ydirson@fr.alcove.com> was heard to say:
| Hm... this may address the problem at hand, but not the "stripping the
| tags should only give the text" issue.  OTOH, it gives some sort of
| backward compatibility, but I'm not completely at ease here.

I think that's a nice rule, but I'm not sure it's useful enough to be
given very much weight. Certainly DocBook (and any other vocabulary
that relies on generated text) fails on this score. There's just too
much semantic information in the tags for us to expect the prose to be
meaningful without them.

| Ideally, I think we would need to have a core of technologies,
| suitable both for text and data processing, and specific ones for each
| of the two.

I don't think we're too far from that, actually. XML 1.0 seems to
strike a nice balance for the core. Similarly, XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0
are very useful in both environments (and not overly biased in either
direction).

W3C XML Schema may be moving more in the data direction and XML Query
may initially be biased that way (but there's a large community
interested in text-based queries, though that may not make it into
1.0).

| Hm... why are there so many decisions in all those XML-related
| technologies that make me more and more reluctant to move to them ?

Because they are being developed rapidly by a large community of
people with diverse needs some of whom sometimes behave like 800lb
gorillas.

This is the price we pay for being successful in demonstrating that an
extensible markup language could practically be deployed over the
internet.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | There has never been a perfect
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | government, because men have
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | passions; and if they did not have
                                   | passions, there would be no need
                                   | for government.--Voltaire


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