I'll be at the Enterprise Architect Summit in Palm Springs next week, on a couple of panels. One's entitled Schemas in the wild: XML takes on the vertical industries, and the panelists are Jon Bosak and Jean Paoli. The single most important question I'd like to ask these guys is: how do we strike the proper balance between freedom and control? By freedom I mean incremental and iterative evolution of data structures in response to patterns of real-world use. By control I mean the predictable regularity enforced by a DTD or XSD.

For quite awhile now, Jon Udell's been asking the same sorts of questions as I did in my longwinded write-up yesterday.

shortname=schemas_freedom_and_control