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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] typing and markup (was Re: XQuery types)
 On Mon, 2002-05-06 at 14:57, Uche Ogbuji wrote: > Because I assumed we were talking about utility for XML, not general > purpose programming, I ommitted the 25 pages it requires to discuss > the philosophy behind first-class dynamic typing without ambiguity. This discussion's gotten me thinking once again about whether XML is appropriate to the tasks for which it is being sold. There was a long discussion about types here a few years ago in which someone suggested that the types provided by DTDs were in fact far too rich, and that perhaps CDATA/ID/IDREF was already more than enough. Then we get into W3C XML Schema types, which I consider far too overgrown, and now XQuery is in the type mire. I have to confess that I'm starting to wonder if the mismatch between "business customer demands" and "markup's natural capabilities" isn't likely to show more and more over time, and that adding more types to the framework will add complexity rather than capability. Every now and then I peek in at the query-datamodel draft to see if there's good reason to change my mind, and I can't say I've found anything promising. Text in general seems much better at ambiguity than at specificity. Markup structures help, but I'm not particularly convinced that they help that much. Defining canonical lexical representations (and transformations that avoid inflicting them on humans) seems like a better route around this than defining types. Of course, as Truman Capote supposedly said of Jack Kerouac, "that's not writing, that's typing." (Note that I have most of Kerouac's books and very deliberately zero of Capote.) It's time to get back to work on Regular Fragmentations, I guess. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com 
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