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At 7:44 PM -0500 3/4/02, Daniel Veillard wrote: > I would be tempted to tease and ask what is an XML document (would >the TAG ever find the answer ;-) . I also note that in use case like >the Jabber protocol, you never end-up with a "fully composed document" >it only exists once the processing is finished and that it had become >useless. Is this really a problem? According to the XML spec "A data object is an XML document if it is well-formed, as defined in this specification." That does leave the question of what a data object is, but I think a reasonable answer is "a sequence of bytes or a sequence of Unicode characters". Pretty clearly the spec does not intend that a data object be a traditional OOP object of some kind. I do wish the spec made that last point explicit, but I do think it won't get anybody into trouble and might indeed pull a few developers people out of the quicksand they've mired themselves in by believing things like objects can be XML documents instead of representation of an XML document. (To cite a classic OOP example, nobody believes a Car object is a car. Why do developers insist on claiming Document objects are documents?) -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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