Dissillusioned about interoperability.

[James Tauber]

> To me, it sounds like you could do with some tools for mapping different
> data structures that represent similar underlying data structures to a
> common model.  The problem isn't that XML is too flexible; rather, it's
> that no one has yet built something handy for making "everyone else's
> representation" into "my representation". It doesn't seem like a light
> project, but it doesn't seem impossible, either.

I'm involved in the development of a markup language that is what could be
described as weakly-typed, ie of the form:

<object>
    <property name="type">foo</property>
    <property name="a">bar</property>
    <property name="b">baz</property>
    ...
</object>

I have often thought that it would be useful to have a standard transform
between this and a strongly-typed form:

<foo>
    <a>bar</a>
    <b>baz</b>
</foo>

Fairly simple XSLT for each direction of transform.

Actually, I can think of a handful of simple little XSLT transforms that
might be useful for this sort of thing:

One could turn all elements into <element type="...">...</element>
Another could turn all attributes into child elements
and so on...

James Tauber



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