Re: Comments on XBC Use Cases

/ "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@intergraph.com> was heard to say:
| I want to challenge only one of your positions, Norm.

Feel free ;-)

| A question one might ask is where is the threshold for 
| the length of a lifecycle at which point it is better 
| to use XML versus a format that is more performant and 
| if, from which, the XML representation can be derived without 
| loss? 

I think you're asking "how long does a document have to exist before
it becomes important to be able to read it independent of the systems
that originally produced it?"

| What about short lifecycle documents?
|
| Lifecycle is in the eye of the operator.  While the lifecycle 
| property is a compelling property of XML, it is not of 
| necessity a constraining property of all of its applications 
| in time and space.  Forgetting is as important as remembering.

That's a good point. The long-term understandability of an ephemeral
message is irrelevant. Though there's nothing about understandability
that prevents one from forgetting :-)

To be a little more clear, I wasn't trying to assert that it be a
"constraining property of all of its applications" only that in the
"electronic document" use case, it was a property of very high
importance, in my opinion. That use case, as I understand it, is about
documents authored by humans for communicating information to other
humans. People tend to care about stuff for a long time. I have some
10 year old XML (uh, SGML) documents that I can read just fine and
some 20 year old word processor documents that I fear are gone
forever.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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