Simon St.Laurent wrote:
XML documents have a double identity - they can be
processed by generic XML processors and stored in generic repositories -
and they also have specific content that may require a particular
processor.
We have agreed that generic XML processors cannot do anything useful.
In my mail "What we have agreed on" , I wrote:
3. Fallback to general-purpose XML applications is not useful.
snip
If these are agreed on, we can eliminate some options and concentrate on
the rest.
If you disagree with these four points, please speak up now.
Cheers,
Makoto
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snip
3. Fallback to general-purpose XML applications is not useful.
"What's the XML parser going to do with this block of data? Display it? Not
terribly valuable. Get some namespace information from the inside and then
dispatch based on the namespace? Possibly valuable, but this begs the
question of why wasn't that information out in the MIME headers." (Paul)
"what experience has shown is that fallback
strategies of *any* sort tend to be overrated. In almost every case something
has messed it up. Either we got the granularity wrong (and I see a very good
chance of this happening here given the emergence of alternative forms of
XML),
or it didn't prove to offer useful functionality, or it simply didn't deploy
in
the manner in which we envisioned. About the only success story we have,
actually, are the image/audio/video top-level types, and while these have
worked out tolerably well, their actual value to end users isn't that great."
(Ned)
"Not even possible, in some cases. XML is being used for all sorts of
things from serialising Java Beans to Web server configuration files to
interprocess communication - a lot of these uses are not especially
"displayable". In some cases, the fact that they are written in XML is
the least important thing about them. These are likely to need
specialised registrations, too. Further, if the specification for any
such case is not controlled by a single vendor, then registration in the
vendor tree does not seem appropriate. This would be the case for
situations ranging from a small vendor group (such as the Flashpix
group) through groups such as W3C to bodies such as ISO, ITU, IEE and so
on." (Chris)
Makoto
Fuji Xerox Information Systems
Tel: +81-44-812-7230 Fax: +81-44-812-7231
E-mail: murata(_at_)apsdc(_dot_)ksp(_dot_)fujixerox(_dot_)co(_dot_)jp