Rick said:

> I am a little sceptical that "application" is such a general
> term that (like s- words) rules-of-thumb that use that term
> as if they were homogenous will wrong-foot us.
>
> Lumping all "applications" together, then deciding based on some
> phoney quantification of what is most common that we should adopt as
> a rule of thumb the rule that may suit one bunch of applications is bad
> methodology.
> 
> And "percentage"? Of clients? of servers? of middleware? of messages?
> 
> Engineering is based on quantifying aspects of particular jobs in
> order to be able replcate success, not lumping things together.
> It is some kind of logical fallacy to apply the 80/20 rule to
> collections of disparate objects.
> 
> Also, the "elimiate non-essential tags" rule flies in the
> face of the capabilities of XML Schemas, where introducing extra
> layers is the only way to get different content models: XML Schemas
> forces you to use elements where attributes might be more natural.
> Furthermore, for documents that will be sent for publising, there
> is a kind of "critical mass" or minimum-density-of-metadata without
> which a document is useless for publishing. It would be better
> to re-phrase that "eliminate speculative tags" IMHO.

Hmmm...let me paraphrase that:

"It depends..."

;-)


Andrzej Jan Taramina
Chaeron Corporation: Enterprise System Solutions
http://www.chaeron.com