Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 09:25, <rjelliffe@a...> wrote: >>> XML has no effective conditional text system. I'm starting to wonder why this is an argument for anything. Neither does YAML, or JSON, HTML or MARC or any other markup / structured language, and yet they are all still useful. I'm a bit suspicious of your use of "*text* system" (my emphasis) and question why the markup language in itself should have this. Isn't this why we *have* XSLT? ... >> XSLT uses version number! If needed, a version number can always >> be introduced at the application level. Same namespace, new version >> number - and the application figures it out. > > Rubbish. That does not work in the case of a breaking change. Of course it does, if you want it to. We're talking about ways of making it work, not how specifics failed in that attempt. > We have had exactly this issue in OOXML. We wanted to reform the datatypes > for numbers and so on. But spreadsheet vendors (not Micrsoft) complained > that because there was no lexical distinction and because their software > was written "robustly" so it would not fail when there were unusual > attributes or elements, the existing code base would accept the new format > without generating an error, but it would be misinterpreting it. But you're here talking about versioning as an after-thought in order to fix legacy problems. If the versioning model was in place from the get go, perhaps this would have worked perfectly. I myself use a similar scheme, and it works for rather large and complex systems that use XML as a pipeline language. > So in this situation, the only weapon XML gives us is to either change the > element names or to change the namespace. So in OOXML Strict will be > taking a new namespace. I'm not sure why XML *should* help you. It's markup, not a protocol. ... > In XML, we don't pay attention to these issues because we cannot. Or because we should not? Regards, Alex -- Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps --- http://shelter.nu/blog/ ---------------------------------------------- ------------------ http://www.google.com/profiles/alexander.johannesen ---
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] |
