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> From: Rick Jelliffe > But I do agree that the term "self-describing" does seem open > for misinterpretation by anyone who has not looked at XML for more > than a minute: it may suggest that XML forces one to use names > from some global controlled vocabulary, or that it does more than > a simple sanity check on the names. In the XML world, 'self describing' seems to mean, self-describing, ie, XML data holds all the information needed to process and understand it. The problem is not with human readers (heck, they'll interpret almost anything), but that calling XML self-describing ascribes magical properties to, and/or magically simplifies machine understanding of, the data (presumably due to the data being tagged). Which is likely as not to mislead and eventual disappoint many people. Certainly I'd like to know what descriptive power XML has that would allows us to declare victory in this regard and throw away all our domain specific procedural code and business logic, replacing it with a general problem solver. AI researchers must be kicking themselves ;). regards Bill de hÓra
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