---
title: "Schemas, Freedom, and Control"
date: 2003-10-07T11:12:49-04:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2003/10/07/schemas-freedom-and-control/
author: Les Orchard
---

# Schemas, Freedom, and Control

<blockquote cite="URL">
I'll be at the Enterprise Architect Summit in Palm Springs next week,
on a couple of panels. One's entitled <a href="http://www.fawcette.com/conferences/eas/sessions.aspx#13SchemasWild">Schemas in the wild: XML takes
on the vertical industries</a>, 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.
</blockquote>
<div class="credit" align="right"><small>Source:<cite><a href="http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/10/07.html#a821">Jon Udell's weblog, XML vocabularies: freedom and control</a></cite></small></div>
<p>
For quite awhile now, Jon Udell's been asking the same
sorts of questions as I did in my <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/blog/tech/rss_data_and_schema.html">longwinded write-up yesterday</a>.
</p>
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