Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Once again, I come to you to whine and moan about the state of technology. Once again, it is after a foray deep into the heart of content syndication and blog land. Once again, it is to bemoan the poor state of standards and implementations.This time, however, it's not all Dave Weiner's fault.In the beginning there was XML, and it was good. DTD's while hard to read, hard to document and requiring a moderate learning curve to grap worked. They provided us with the means to make sure that any XML we were given conformed to a standard. Life was good. XSLT was making like happy and there were compilers, syntax checkers and all sorts of tools.Enter the schema. Schema was supposed to fix all the problems of DTDs: more definite datatyping, easier to read, easier to understand. Best of all, when combined with Namespacing, you could --get this-- mix XML document types, and get new functionality out of old systems. This let ambitious people to design RDF, which at its core is just a free-form annotation system with a universal PKID assigned to every discrete chunk of data.The problem with this freedom, is how do you write code to deal with it? Moreover, in this constantly changing datascape (is that a trendy sounding word or what?) how do you check your software without testing against every bit of legitimate data in the world?I have run into many problems recently, working on FeedPod, and the jTOTSP project. JAXP's Namespace support doesn't seem to work. JDOM doesn't like it when people redefine the root namespace inside a subsection of a document. ROME 0.5 chokes on stuff 0.4 runs fine on because of its syntax checking. All of these irk me, but it does lead to the inevitable truth: the freedom of these systems comes at a great cost of complexity. Is it Sun, or JDOM's fault their implementations fail for me? Perhaps. However, with what people expect out of these fundamental (and sometimes complex) components -- parsers -- changing constantly, is it any suprise?Sometimes I miss the DTD driven days of yore -- 6 years ago.