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Re: XML is boring (was Re: coming clean with the SGML crowd)

• From: "Samuel R. Blackburn" <sblackbu@e...>
• To: <xml-dev@i...>,"Andy Dent" <dent@h...>
• Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998 07:19:03 -0400

It all depends on how you look at it. If you agree on reserving
a tag name, then you can express type information in the same
syntax as XML. For example:

<typeinfo>
<EVENT>
<NAME>
<type>string</type>
<description>User supplied name of the event</description>
</NAME>
<TIME>
<type>ui4</type>
<description>Number of seconds since 1970-01-01</description>
</TIME>
<CHECKSUM>
<type>ui8</type>
<description>MD5 checksum of the NAME and TIME fields</description>
</CHECKSUM>
</EVENT>
</typeinfo>

Granted, this is a simplistic method but all it is meant to do is
supply a human reading the XML enough information to write
a validation routine for the data. IMHO you cannot express
enough information in a generic fashion (i.e. DTD or the above
scheme) that will allow data validation in a generic fashion.
It is easy to validate the simple things like "this is a number"
or "this is a date" but validating things like "this is an MD5
checksum of the previous two fields" is impossible.

Sam

-----Original Message-----
From: Andy Dent <dent@h...>
To: Samuel R. Blackburn <sblackbu@e...>; Peter Murray-Rust
<peter@u...>; xml-dev@i... <xml-dev@i...>
Date: Friday, September 11, 1998 6:51 AM
Subject: Re: XML is boring (was Re: coming clean with the SGML crowd)


>At 6:28 PM +0800 11/9/98, Samuel R. Blackburn wrote:
>>Looking at XML from a data centric
>>perspective, there are things in it that are worthless, DTD's
>>for example.
>I disagree with this - DTD's for example will help us build a database
>schema to contain the XML. Otherwise we'd have to scan a large XML file to
>deduce the structure then rescan to store into the database.
>
>This is a wholly data-centric viewpoint.
>Andy Dent BSc MACS AACM, Software Designer, A.D. Software, Western
Australia
>OOFILE - Database, Reports, Graphs, GUI for c++ on Mac, Unix & Windows
>PP2MFC - PowerPlant->MFC portability
>http://www.highway1.com.au/adsoftware/crossplatform.html


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