"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Not Necessarily The Good News

On the use of XSDs, Bob DuCharme writes...

If the bad news is that the majority of XML developers have picked an ugly, convoluted syntax that is difficult to maintain when they store metadata about their types, the good news is that at least they're storing metadata about their types in parsable XML.
That's not necessarily good news if the unwanted side effects of using XSDs gunk up your systems. The one cannot necessarily make up for the other. It is not just about "ugly syntax", nor is it even about ugly syntax at all.

The problems lie in the lack of expressiveness (semantics more than syntax) and the unnecessary dependencies XSDs can ripple through one's systems if one is not exceedingly careful. Such care is not often promoted by tools based on XSDs, yet in this realm people tend to rely on tools much more than wisdom.

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About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.