Urrrrp!  No.  It is the smaller corporations 
who have to be strict because they have a lot 
fewer resources for negotiating out what is 
signal and what is noise.   John Cowan is 
right for the mainstream.

It isn't about big vs small; it is about 
what can be afforded.  If my XML experts can't 
negotiate the instances, we have to rely on the 
DTD or Schema.  If they can negotiate the DTD 
or Schema, I can afford to ship only well-formed. 
Do I have to rely on their code as the contract 
for all the instances?

Be careful of replying in the affirmative to 
the last one, because if you do, you have 
made Microsoft's case and given AOL only 
one way to go from here.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@[...].org]

1/27/2002 5:16:27 PM, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@[...].com>  
wrote:

>  At the syntactical level - only ship well-formed content 
>  if you call it XML - I'm happy to agree completely.
> 
>  Above that, there's lots and lots of room for disagreement.

I agree with Simon.  For example, my canonical example of an order; 
if you want to stay in business, you'll be liberal in the vocabulary 
and structure you accept  so long as it is well-formed and the 
information you need to process and validate it (in the business 
sense, not the XML sense)  is in there somewhere. Nobody but a 
handful of mega-corps will be able to get away with saying "if you 
want to do business with us, you need to use our schemata."

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