From: Tobias Reif Date: 2001-11-23T00:13:34+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:26139] XML conformance XML, conformance; a story. In a company, there's team A. The managers assigned them to author 5000 XML documents in 1 month; a product catalog. The teamlead, in the face of the tight deadline, chooses an XML IDE that doesn't throw so many errors at the authors, so they can do their work faster. They make the deadline, the boss is happy, and the documents are handed over to a team of developers, who transform the XML documents to various XML formats for different media: web, print, etc. They too use tools that don't overdo it with unnecessary and esoteric conformance; it's big fun, and they too finish their work quickly. (Luckily, they use tools by the same vendor, from the same package.) The boss is very impressed, each team member gets a T-Shirt, and they hand over their documents to the client, company B. The clients calls minutes later: they can't use a single file. They can't be read by any of their XML tools, because the documents are not well-formed. They even tried some lax, non-conforming tools, but all choked. (they were non-conforming in a different way than the tools of company A; there is no standard for breaking the spec. ) Both teams would have to start from the beginning, but the client contracted another company C. At company C, the developers *and* and the clients have fun. Tobi -- Tobias Reif http://www.pinkjuice.com/myDigitalProfile.xhtml go_to('www.ruby-lang.org').get(ruby).play.create.have_fun http://www.pinkjuice.com/ruby/