(2003-02-11) Xml Migration

Jon Udell expands on Chad Dickerson's too-brief picture of the problems they've had at Info World migrating their Content Management System-handled XML content. Chad said No one intended for our XML data to grow unwieldy over the past few years, but it did. It takes a lot of hard work and attention to maintain the semantic integrity of the data represented in your XML, as your business morphs and changes and new people come along to touch and manipulate the data in different ways... Data validation is important and should be encouraged and practiced, but like security, only insofar as it allows people reasonable freedom to do their jobs. This is why, in the relational db world, you try to control data validity at the db-server, rather than at the application level. Hmmm, sounds like a trade-off for flexible Data Store users to face up to....