>I fear I may be straying into "re-beating of dead horse" territory, but that continues to >suggest a move toward totally customized messages traded after individual >negotiation with each trading partner...which leads to the questions: >is that the way XML is going to be handled in typical usage? Is that a >good idea?
I think that this gets to exactly the heart of what needs to be oh so carefully managed with XML. If it isn't, we're staring with dismay at a potential Tower of Babel where we have no standards whatever - along with a payload of added complexity and difficulty of use, free of charge. Last week I had a situation where a business partner did not send us a 945 that we needed to close out our ASN generation process. I mis-speak; it wasn't a 945, it was an XML message that was simply a shipment advice transaction. (It comes in the same path as the 945's we get from other business partners.) The analyst that I was working with could not, for the life of her, find the errant XML transaction in her system because she had to manually look through all of the XML transactions for that day. I had no experience with their system so I refrained from helpful suggestions like "Why don't you use 'grep?'" and "See, I told you that this XML stuff is for the birds." However, I wager that if I had the same volume of transactions in X12 that she had in XML, that if we both started at the same time I could find my data a HELLUVA lot faster than she could. And at the end of the day, it's not the 99.99% of the transactions that work that we care about so much; it's the 0.01% that don't. XML not ready for prime time? You betcha it's not. I'm getting more entertainment out of this than I am with HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] . Please use the following Message Identifiers as your subject prefix: <SALES>, <JOBS>, <LIST>, <TECH>, <MISC>, <EVENT>, <OFF-TOPIC> Access the list online at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
