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Updated: 9/1/2002; 6:58:04 PM.
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Sunday, July 28, 2002 |
Looks like Google has reindexed. Nice to see Simon once again prominently in my related list.
9:04:24 PM 
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Rael and Tim each get new home pages.
7:09:06 PM
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Clemens Vasters: Complete agreement may be a problem, but agreement on a composite, well-defined subset of things that both parties are interested in and understand is not. Pardon me, but did you say both? BOTH? BOTH!!!??? Works well 1:1, but how about nnn:mmmmmm?
And then later: Loose and tight coupling can happily coexist. I was more thinking of other ways. Ones that do not require existing instance documents to be invalidated when an XML schema is only extended. For further reading, see the XML Schema Versioning Best Practice document produced by the MITRE Corporation and the xml-dev list group.
6:47:31 PM
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Gordon Weakliem: I work in the travel industry, and one thing that's happened over the years is that there's been a number of efforts to create a standard library of business objects for interchange. Without exception, every one of those efforts has failed. Now some of that may be due to complexity, or to competitive pressures, or to hyper-abstraction, but my belief is that the basic problem is that the philosophy is flawed... I submit that what we in the travel industry are and should be exchanging documents... They're representations of flights, with partial information. Bingo.
6:24:57 PM
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Tim Bray: Good heavens, is someone arguing that markup or meta-markup have semantics? Seems to me that semantics lives in the human mind and executable computer programs; one of the virtues of descriptive markup a la XML is that you get to choose what semantics you want to apply.
6:18:59 PM
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Clemens Vasters: Loose coupling is indeed a Good Thing for 1:1 and, in a bit more limited fashion, for 1:N communication environments; in N:M way environments, the lack of tight rules is a call for chaos. Looks like we are farther apart than I would have thought. I would have said that tight coupling is indeed a Good Thing for 1:1 and, in a bit more limited fashion, for 1:N communication environments; in N:M way environments, getting complete agreement on a set of tight rules is practically impossible.
For an excellent, informative, readable, and highly entertaining view on this subject, read Clay Shirky's In Praise of Evolvable Systems.
10:28:16 AM
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