RE: SV: [ubl-dev] Customizing where 'Simpler-Than-UBL' (STU) is needed

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

At 2007-02-09 15:41 -0700, David RR Webber \(XML\) wrote:
>The solution is what you hint at - an interoperability hub - that on one
>side speaks UBL - and the otherside speaks a dialect that allows the
>little guys to at least get their data to them.
>
>  ; -)

What you may do behind the curtain is irrelevant.  What you expose to 
others is critically important.

This isn't a humourous or flippant issue.

>The key is knowing that the little guys XML is 100% compatible with the
>bigendian UBL.  BTW - my experience is that namespaces are ugly when it
>comes to little guys handling them - they tend to break things...!

In many ways it is because tools can't handle namespace 
conformance.  Even in UBL there are two information items that have 
the same local name but in two namespaces ... this wasn't planned, 
but it is there, and both names are unique when considering their 
full qualification ... how can one effectively work with an instance 
without namespaces when there is an ambiguity when you remove the 
namespaces (I say "effectively" because of course anything can be 
done with various workarounds)?

Is it better to let users break things and be non-conformant, or is 
it better to tell users when they break things so that they can get 
them right and not broken so that they can be assured of global 
interoperability.

>Plain-old-xml was where we started ten years ago - I guess this is back
>to basics.

I cannot tell, David, if you are trawling for controversy by dragging 
this out or if you are trying to be sincere here.

"Basics" is conformance.   I don't see how more basic you can 
get.  One cannot discount namespaces as that is the basis of global 
identification of information items in XML vocabularies.  This isn't 
just me and my beliefs or the committee's beliefs ... it has long 
been accepted that "basic XML" is defined by namespaces:

   Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One
   http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#xml-namespaces
   Good practice: Namespace adoption
   A specification that establishes an XML vocabulary
   SHOULD place all element names and global attribute
   names in a namespace.

Non-conformant or non-namespace-capable tools hurt users who think 
they are doing the right thing because of what the tool 
vendor/authors tell them.  Propagating a non-namespaced "flavour" of 
a namespace-based vocabulary can only contribute to confusion and 
hurt global interoperability and acceptability.

It doesn't matter how "hard" it is, it just is and it is up to 
vendors to help make it easy for users, not to obfuscate the issues.

Do whatever you want behind the scenes.  Expose only conformant UBL 
instances or the user community will be ill-served.  Please don't 
call anything else "UBL".

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken


--
World-wide corporate, govt. & user group XML, XSL and UBL training
RSS feeds:     publicly-available developer resources and training
G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
Crane Softwrights Ltd.          http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/u/
Box 266, Kars, Ontario CANADA K0A-2E0    +1(613)489-0999 (F:-0995)
Male Cancer Awareness Aug'05  http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/u/bc
Legal business disclaimers:  http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/legal