A Plea for Schemas

[Paul Prescod]

Tim Bray wrote:
> 
> At 07:43 PM 11/1/99 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
> >My customers rarely ask about schemas -- they're a lot more worried
> >about transfer protocols and digital signatures.

My customers and students are old-fashioned in comparison.

> And when my customers *do* ask about schemas I start to get nervous,
> as it is often a symptom of starry-eyed hope that when they write the
> schema they've cracked the nut, and somehow "XML will do the rest."

"To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is 
 also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge."
         - Grace Hopper

By the time you have a schema for your domain you have mapped out your
communal understanding of that domain. In many areas that *is* cracking
the nut. As a practical example, consider word processing. By now there
are dozens of word processors and desktop publishers. It would be a
massive effort to come to understand their commonalities and define the
"universal DTP language."

 Paul Prescod

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