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RE: The general XML processing problem

• To: "'XML DEV'" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: The general XML processing problem
• From: Bill de hÓra <bill.dehora@p...>
• Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 10:59:03 +0100
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <3D336FD9.3080302@e...>
• Organization: Propylon
• Reply-to: <bill.dehora@p...>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patrick Durusau [mailto:pdurusau@e...] 
>
> >(SSL)
> >The hierarchical issues arise from the particular style of embedded 
> >markup that XML uses, and there's a serious trade-off there.  XML is 
> >not as flexible for created labeled structures as it might 
> be precisely 
> >because it is typically embedded directly in documents, and because 
> >XML's creators found ambiguity a problem.
> >
>
> Yes, and the ambiguity solution inherited from SGML was to solve the 
> problem in syntax, not in the processing layer. Since the ambiguity 
> problem was solved by Earley in 1970 (Earley, J. (1970) An efficient 
> context-free parsing algorithm. Communications of the Association for 
> Computing Machinery, 13(2):94-102) as well as dealt with in NLP and 
> other disciplines by techniques such as active chart parsing 
> and parse 
> forests, I fail to see any reason to continue to with a 
> solution in syntax.

Are we really done then? There's a lot of work done after Earley, ie
Marcus, (and of which Schematron is possibly a special case, I'm not
sure yet) that suggest to me we're not done without resorting to syntax.
The ideal at the XML level would be not to resort to context-free
parsers that require probabilities (PCFGs). And there's still markup to
deal with, even when it's called punctuation ;)

Bill de hÓra
..
Propylon
www.propylon.com 

 

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