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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Why the Infoset?
 At 07:28 PM 25/07/00 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote: >At 05:46 PM 7/25/00 -0400, Jonathan Borden wrote: >>XML is a serialization of a logical document structure defined by the XML >>Infoset. > >WARNING: 'XML is a serialization' is only one way to look at it. > >XML is a syntax, and the 'logical document structure' is a particular >interpretation of that syntax is another. What Simon said. XML took a lot of static in its early days because it was "just syntax" - there are certainly a lot of people who want to think only in terms of object models (groves, DOMs, whatever) and see the syntax as disposable fluff. Me, I think syntax is crucial. Because describing data structures in a straightforward, interoperable way is really hard to get right and very often fails. At the end of the day, if you really want to interoperate, you have to describe the bits on the wire. That's what XML does. Think of it another way... a promise like "my implementation of SQL (or posix, or DOM, or XLib) will interoperate with yours" is really hard to keep. A promise like "I'll ship you well-formed XML docs containing only the following tags and attributes" is remarkably, dramatically, repeatably more plausible in the real world. Not that SAX and the DOM and so on aren't good things. But at the end of the day, de facto and de jure, XML is syntax. -Tim 
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