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>Len (to Bob G)
 
>From <p> to <partno>, information is gained.  In the other direction, it is
>lost.   How does your continuum hypothesis work with that?
 
I don't see this continuum as a system that has to have forward and reverse gears, but as a model (as with treating time as the fourth dimension) to help determine other things, like appropriate choice of tools.  But first:
 
>Bob Glushko wrote:
 
>On one end are pure narrative things and on the other end are purely transactional ones
 
I've been using the terms "content-oriented" and "transaction-oriented" myself (they're all documents! They're all data!), so I was happy to see Bob use the word "transactional" here. Sean's quantitive approach may have more of a hard-science appeal than heuristics we might throw out (text nodes and element nodes as siblings: content-oriented; data starting or ending up in a DBMS: transaction oriented; etc.).
 
Back to tool choice: I've been thinking more about a potential correspondence between this dichotomy and the XSD/RelaxNG dichotomy. Look at all the DBMS vendor representatives on the original XSD Working Group, not to mention the e-commerce types (including a former employee of Bob's). Rick Jelliffe recently predicted [1] that  XML Schemas 1.1 would be "slightly more DBMS-oriented and even less publishing-oriented." RelaxNG, on the other hand, is favored by leading proponents of content publishing-oriented document types: DocBook, the TEI, and (the W3C's!) XHTML 2.0 working group. Sean has noticed this correspondence as well [2].
 
Can the data-DBMS-transactional XML vs. document-content-publishing XML distinction inform decisions about which schema language, and hence tools, are more appropriate for a given system?
 
Bob
 
[1] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4624
[2] http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/archives/2004_04_18_seanmcgrath_archive.html#108258054931482097

 

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