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Ronald Bourret wrote: > I think where the XML Schemas data types have missed the boat is in > their degree of complexity, as Amy Lewis points out. If you want > interoperability, you can't go much beyond saying that a number is an > integer. It is the up to the recipient of the document to decide (a) > whether they can represent that number in whatever language / system > they are using and (b) what data type they choose to represent it in. > > (Note that range restrictions -- e.g. I only sell quantities between 1 > and 10 -- are separate from type. This is most evident when you think > about how little data has a real world range of, say, -32768 to 32767, > and shows the artificiality of data types like short, int, and double in > markup.) While I don't like XSchema particularly well, this argument is a bit flawed. XSchema is, among other things, supposed to play a major role in XML-DBs and mappings of XML to/from other DBs. To the DB people, differences between short, int and wider types sometimes matter, not because of storage but because of I/O and disk R/W capacity. There are life databases where this makes a significant difference in performance. Whether it was really a good idea to force this on unsuspecting users who wouldn't even think of touching a DB is another matter. J.Pietschmann
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