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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Objections to / uses of PSVI?
 Hi Ron. Ronald Bourret wrote: > I now understand Rick Jelliffe's comment about separating the future into > PSVI and XML worlds. > > Assuming the PSVI is read/write (and there is no reason to believe that it > shouldn't be), I can do things like using the DOM to create schema-less > documents with typed nodes. Since serializing this accurately means (as > you point out) serializing the type information, we've just lost XML. Is this another monk achieving zen? ;-) Seriously, though, if we are to *save* XML it's going to mean rooting out all of the infoset-think. I was last engaged in this precise controversy more than twenty-five years ago. At that time, in the field of philology, the definitive statement of the other side's position was Michael Nagler's _Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer_ (University of California Press, 1974). In a careful and nuanced argument, Prof. Nagler built his case for primacy of an impetus behind the expressed syntax of the instance. He labeled that impetus the 'fluid preverbal Gestalt', a juxtaposition of three words which has ever since been my exemplary definition of scholarly bulls*. Those three words are so carefully chosen as in practice to define absolutely nothing, but in theory to appear to explain everything. And though 'infoset' may be the fpG's manifestation to the current age, the argument itself is in fact two millennia older. As a technical term of the Sanskrit grammarians, artha (sorry, Len) signifies what is usually meant by 'semantics' in xml-dev discussions: a 'meaning' expressing the 'purpose' or 'intent' of the author. Thus understood, artha is the product of vivaksa, the impetus to utterance. The 'syntactic' school, if I may anachronistically call them that, built a competing understanding of language around the term sphota, literally a 'bursting' or 'blooming'--the instance manifestation. Like many of today's infoset-thinkers, Prof. Nagler was very uncomfortable with the notion of the unconstrained sphota. In fact, because the simple understanding of sphota could not be hedged by a particular vocabulary, even a metrical one, Nagler went so far as, effectively, to attempt redefining sphota not as the expression of (or in) the instance, but as some Platonic Form of that expression--the argument being that since the instance could manifest itself as pretty much anything, it was insufficiently concrete to have its own identifiable reality other than as the manifestation of its archetype: "But any one Gestalt or sphota beggars definition, for it is itself undifferentiated with respect to any describable phonological feature. The given word, phrase or sentence is only a kind of hypostasis of this entity--an allomorph, as I have been using the term--as a particular geometrical shape is a hypostasis of its Platonic Form." (loc. cit. p. 14) Call me paranoid, but the precise argument has been used against me repeatedly by the infoset-thinkers. They argue that I don't really mean bare syntax when I say bare syntax, because I won't limit that bare syntax to a particular vocabulary. Therefore, they argue that what I really must mean by bare syntax is a manifestation of the Platonic Form of that syntax which, to their way of thinking, makes my sphota as abstract--and therefore really the same thing as--their fpG. The PSVI debate, and particularly its XQuery/XPath Task Force manifestations is as good a demonstration as we are going to get of where the choice of infoset-think leads and, more crucially, what it leaves behind in the unexplored and unrealized syntactic possibilities of XML. Respectfully, Walter Perry 
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