A Plea for Schemas

[David Megginson]

Len Bullard <cbullard at hiwaay.net> writes:

> How many of you know how to start, 

Easy-ish.

> work, 

Hard.

> and complete an enterprise engineering project?

Rarely seen.

> What tools would you use?

The delete key.  

The only way most projects actually get finished is when management is
forced to retract most of its requirements and decide which ones are
actually worth spending (limited) time and money on.  No advance
planning process seems capable of avoiding this problem.

> It is up to us to make schemas useful.  XML Doesn't Care.

Right, and it's far too early for us really to know what we need (as
Tim pointed out in a slightly different context).  

We're just *starting* to figure out what XML itself is useful for: a
single formal schema standard could certainly be convenient (to save a
bit of the work of writing validation software), but it's just another
accessory, like a stylesheet or API standard.

My customers rarely ask about schemas -- they're a lot more worried
about transfer protocols and digital signatures.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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