Subject: RE: Formatting Objects considered harmful From: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 01:00:25 -0400 |
Paul Prescod wrote: > There is a subtletly that we are passing over here. When a client sends me > information in their corporate DTD it takes me about half a day to wrap my > head around it enough to be able to do something useful with it. You can't > throw it into a search engine or word processor and expect to be able to > do anything useful with it. To make it useful, either the customer or I > must map it to some more generally known data model -- either a display > data model like FOs, or a search model. This is all true, but interface building is one of the most significant activities going on in the real world. The issue isn't whether or not interfaces need be built (because this isn't a perfect world) rather given your druthers, would you rather build an interface to a system which i/os XML expressed via a DTD or, alternatively a poorly documented binary protocol. Half a days work seems like a very short time ... Having done my share of systems building, it seems that a common activity is transforming on set of data onto another, gluing together libraries, matching APIs, converting a query in one language to SQL etc etc etc. To the extent that the I/O is via XML and an arbitrary DTD, much of this transformational interface building can be expressed via XSLT. This has important implications for tasks such as EDI. Suppose you had the desire to build an interface engine which accepts various types of EDI messages, and suppose an XML converter exists for each message format but each company uses a slightly different format for its messages, how would you go about designing such a system? Would you express the message format conversions in XSLT, perl, java, or C++? Jonathan Borden http://jabr.ne.mediaone.net XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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