Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Lab 4 Schema Clarifications

I came away from our lab 4 design session with a couple wrong impressions regarding the schema, and got them clarified by Sam yesterday. Here's a less ambiguous version of the message format we're supposed to use (would have updated it on the lab page but I'm not on campus at the moment).


<idea guid="">
  <initiated date="" technology="(wstechnology)">Name provided by user</initiated>
  <submitted date="" technology="(submit server tech)">RY name of submit server creator</submitted>
  <spam>true</spam>
  <domain>www.foo.com</domain>
  <body>Foo and gunk are better for this site than xs</body>
</idea>


You should notice that the wsuser that we POSTed from our submit script is getting thrown away. I assumed that since we went through the trouble of POSTing it, we'd definitely use it-- and I ended up putting the user provided name in the submitted element.

Looking back I don't think we got our schema right. I think we're trying to cram too much information into too few elements. Sure, it keeps us from having to add an additional element (<user> for example) to store the information; but the result is that we've lost some information-- wsuser (less important) and made it more confusing (more important).

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