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On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Norman Gray wrote: Norman, > > Thanks. My worry is if the original VOTable people could come up with > > something which is now being deemed to be "not proper XML" - then we may > > well fall into a similar trap. > > I'm not really clear why VOTable is `not proper XML'. If I understand > Mark's summary, I completely agree with your analysis and response. > If you believe in XSchema, then you believe that element contents are > typed (column 1 here is a string, column 2 a numeric, for example), > and you will be upset that these don't have specified types. If you > don't believe in XSchema (and you possibly shouldn't, unless you are > a database person who wants to suck all XML into SQL databases), then > you don't care that there isn't a predefined type for each element -- > that's the application's (the thing reading the XML) problem. The thing is that Tony Linde and several other people contributing to this debate are database people. I get the feeling that quite a lot of the debate is being carried on without any particular ideas about what the unspecified benefits of being "hardXML" (shorthand which came to be used in this discussion for schema-friendly XML) are, but that may be unjustified criticism. Since I don't understand all the database issues, I don't feel qualified to wade in and tell them they're all talking nonsense. In fairness, TL has not said that VOTable should be (necessarily) scrapped or superceded, he has just attempted (successfully!) to open up the debate about whether we should be considering more hardXML alternatives, probably to coexist with VOTable classic. As a general comment, VOTable seems to be moving from a DTD-based definition to a schema-based one. Mark -- Mark Taylor Starlink Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK [log in to unmask] +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/