Every time I have ever had the displeasure of looking at an X.whatever spec, I always end up coming away with the same conclusion.
Somehow, despite these specifications being 90% metadata by weight, they seem to consistently forget the part of the spec that lets you actually know what something is. and that part is just left up to context.
I could well be missing something, but a majority of the time it feels to me like they set out to make a database schema, and accidentally wrote the sqlite file format spec instead.
Like thanks, its nice that I can parse this into a data structure :). It would be nicer, however if doing so gave me any idea of what I can do with the data I've parsed.
Though to be fair I feel the same way about the entire concept of XML schemas. The fact that you theoretically can validate an xml document against a schema is honestly completely useless. If I am parsing XML, its because my code already knows what information it needs from the XML document, and really it should also know where that information is. I don't need a separate schema definition to tell me that! its already expressed!! In the part where I am parsing out the data I need!!!
Somehow, despite these specifications being 90% metadata by weight, they seem to consistently forget the part of the spec that lets you actually know what something is. and that part is just left up to context.
I could well be missing something, but a majority of the time it feels to me like they set out to make a database schema, and accidentally wrote the sqlite file format spec instead.
Like thanks, its nice that I can parse this into a data structure :). It would be nicer, however if doing so gave me any idea of what I can do with the data I've parsed.
Though to be fair I feel the same way about the entire concept of XML schemas. The fact that you theoretically can validate an xml document against a schema is honestly completely useless. If I am parsing XML, its because my code already knows what information it needs from the XML document, and really it should also know where that information is. I don't need a separate schema definition to tell me that! its already expressed!! In the part where I am parsing out the data I need!!!