Thanks.  I wasn't too sure what I was after really... faced with someone questioning the need for schemas I was a little stumped on what to say.  I provided the usual answers, but thought it might be helpful if I could point them to a w3schools style page or article (which I couldn't find).





On 01/02/2008, noah_mendelsohn@u... <noah_mendelsohn@u...> wrote:


Well, it's not an article, and I'm guessing
that much of it is aimed at a slightly more technical audience than you
might have in mind, but in 2002 I gave a DevCon talk, the slides for which
Sam Ruby has kindly posted on his Intertwingly blog at [1].  At least
one of the slides nets out my views on that, though at a pretty high level.
 In case it's of help, the contents of the pertinent slide (#9) are:









What are schemas for?



* Contracts:  agreeing on formats



* Tool building: know what the data will
be before the first instance shows up

    * Database integration

    * User interface tools

    * Programming language bindings



* Validation:  make sure we got what
we expected





Noah



[1] http://intertwingly.net/slides/2002/devcon/SchemaSecrets.ppt



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Noah Mendelsohn 

IBM Corporation

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Cambridge, MA 02142

1-617-693-4036

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