XML Companion, The, Third Edition

Industry standard models

Some government organizations and industry-wide standardization committees have produced standard DTDs and XML Schemas. The case for adopting a standard for exchange of information with other organizations is incontrovertible.

But when exchange is not a core issue, or when data could be stored locally in a more appropriate format, the picture then becomes more complex.

Advantages

There are powerful reasons for considering the adoption of a standard model:

• The costly and time-consuming task of developing a custom model is avoided.

• The model usually benefits from the wisdom of many expert contributors.

• The model usually benefits from the contribution of at least one XML expert.

In addition, consider the case of two organizations ...