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Re: Fw: PLEASE 'splain a DTD's purpose
At 02:52 PM 11/1/2002 -0600, Michael Mattias wrote:
>Out of the mouths of babes....
the rest of the story.
Michael congratulated xmEllen for getting the point, to which she replied
(I thought incredulously,) "Are you serious?"
Here's my reply to her. This is gonna be fun tonight. What else have I
to do? At least I don't have to work, neener neener.
>Are you serious?
Yes, he is. XML is far from the Silver Bullet (tm) that we all thought would
save us from the inadequacies of other forms of electronic data interchange.
There are those of us who have been saying for years "XML is interesting, but
it isn't a panacea and all it does is replace one set of standards with NO
standards and push them from a directorate back down to the trading partner."
Nobody listened, because the standards and the interchanges we used weren't
HTML, and weren't on the Web. Everything today has to be done on the web,
which is why people are today throwing out perfectly good EDI interfaces in
favor of what I like to call "electronic rip 'n read," or browsing a customer
web site and keypunching the data. Where is the progress in that?
The fact of the matter is that there is a *great* potential for confusion and,
dare I say, near-anarchy before some standards organization comes along and
mandates an XML standard. And there are several atoms of this already, like
RosettaNet. This is truly replacing one set of standards with another, and
the only difference is that the XML standards are bulkier and harder to read
in a raw format -- and if you don't have a DTD, that's all you can do.
At least I can pull up an X12 document in 'vi' or Notepad and figure out
pretty much what the hell the sender was trying to send. With XML, it's
all so much alphabet soup.
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