What is interoperability anyway / really?

["David RR Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info>]

Dave,

 

Guess we need to broach this topic some too.

 

For me interoperability is about people being able to predictably exchange documents - and publish clear instructions on rules / handling / content models including contextual templates and patterns that are intended / expected.

 

Sadly we have a chunk of folks out there that believe publishing an XSD and then enforcing validation there of is how you achieve interoperability.

 

They are angry and confused when things pass their XSD and proceed to trash their backend applications - or frustrated when people construct what appear to be reasonable content from human perspective - but the XSD rejects as invalid for some arcane reason.  Then of course the final straw is wierd content created automatically by tooling software that passes the XSD but is a nightmare to process and contains 3x the amount of markup that sane people would ever want in there!

 

The problem put simply is that XSD is non-deterministic - and was never meant to be deterministic.

 

So in our case - scripting tools like CAM add context - and ability to assert deterministic rules that make predictable outcomes possible.  A "filter" in effect - that can tell you if the content will be acceptable and make sense.

 

But CAM is designed for business transaction exchanges - not documents. 

 

However the principles are the same - just that the set of "smart" functions need to be adapted to document application needs - such as page counts and section content / page headers / footers, signatures, et al - which are not part of the lexicon of CAM.

 

So - overall seems to me for interoperability - you need the same ability as CAM brings to produce open standard sharable rule sets and patterns that can be verified, documented and will check instances conform to them - but with a document lexicon of functions....

 

Thanks, DW