::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Alaric Snell]

On Wednesday 06 February 2002 11:44, you wrote:

> Yes, but these are only types: they're just ranges of valid values and an
> encoding. I'll grant you that giving something a type *implies* a little
> bit of meaning, when a human reads the thing, or writes a tool to process
> it, but nothing in XML Schema enforces that where I use year I actually
> mean a year, and not some arbitrary value in the appropriate domain.

It can't enforce, no, but it does *say*. It labels a number as a year. It 
can't stop you misleadingly mislabelling things, no, but it *does* provide a 
labelling mechanism :-)

> People have these immense flights of
> fantasy about how XML processing tools can work on any XML document, which
> never amount to anything, because while all the syntax may be
> comprehensible to any tool, it requires some kind of encoding of the
> meaning - as in actual code to process the document in the intended way -
> to make it anything worthwhile.

Yes. This raised its head on XML-DEV recently, with the usual debates about 
'I could write "xyzzy" to mean "true" as long as I and the person I 
communicate with agree on this' and so on.

However, it's nicer to have a number with the label 'year' on it than merely 
having the number '2002' and wondering if it's a year or a user ID or a port 
number or...

> Simon

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software