Internal subset equivalent in new schema proposals?

Michael Kay M.H.Kay at eng.icl.co.uk
Wed Nov 25 12:13:11 GMT 1998


>IMHO, set top boxes designed with preconceived program structures will fail
>to attract the interests of production houses and the audience

True if you are thinking of conventional linear programming. False if you
are thinking of interactive information: weather, news, sports results,
programme guides, travel information. If the system is going to process the
data (even just to select and sort it) and not just passively reel it out,
you need a predictable structure that the application understands; and the
application is going to be much more than a simple style sheet.

This is actually causing me a little anguish at the moment. I've suddenly
realised that having an external DTD and a validating parser in place gives
an application no assurances about the structure of the data!

Another example, I feel, of XML being influenced too much by "document"
thinking rather than "data" thinking.

Incidentally we have found people in the media industry very receptive to
the benefits of a clear separation of responsibilities between the designer
of a series (e.g. film/movie reviews) and the author of articles/programmes
within that series. They recognise it as essential to the goal of
"re-purposing" content. We are starting to use XML to control the
organization of some areas of the BBC Worldwide site (www.beeb.com) which we
run, where the disciplines of consistent content structure are now
well-established, without anyone feeling their creativity is impaired.

Mike Kay


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