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Re: patterns vs. identifiers

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Subject: Re: patterns vs. identifiers
• From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
• Date: 20 Aug 2002 15:46:14 +0200
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <r01050300-1015-BA2CBE88B44111D69F470003937A08C2@[192.168.124.21]>
• References: <r01050300-1015-BA2CBE88B44111D69F470003937A08C2@[192.168.124.21]>

On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 15:35, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> Just for the sake of repeating them:
> ---------------------------------------
>    1. XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
>    2. XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
>    3. XML shall be compatible with SGML.
>    4. It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
>    5. The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the
> absolute minimum, ideally zero.
>    6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
>    7. The XML design should be prepared quickly.
>    8. The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
>    9. XML documents shall be easy to create.
>   10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.
> --------------------------------------
> 
> None of those suggest to me that the XML WG set out to produce, for
> instance, RDF.

It depends what you are doing with RDF and I would argue that:

   <book rdf:about="http://my.library/book/0836217462">
        <isbn>0836217462</isbn>
        <title>Being a Dog Is a Full-Time Job</title>
        <author
rdf:resource="http://my.library/author/Charles-M.-Schulz"/>
        <character
rdf:resource="http://my.library/character/Peppermint-Patty"/>
        <character
rdf:resource="http://my.library/character/Charlie-Brown"/>
        <character rdf:resource="http://my.library/character/Snoopy"/>
        <character
rdf:resource="http://my.library/character/Schroeder"/>
        <character rdf:resource="http://my.library/character/Lucy"/>
    </book>

is not more complex than a XML counterpart such as:

   <book id="book_0805033106">
        <isbn>0805033106</isbn>
        <title>Peanuts Every Sunday </title>
        <author href="author_Charles-M.-Schulz"/>
        <character href="character_Sally-Brown"/>
        <character href="character_Snoopy"/>
        <character href="character_Linus"/>
        <character href="character_Lucy"/>
    </book>

(examples from http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/10/04/linking/index.html)

The fact that a language allows to write readable documents doesn't mean
that any document using this language will be readable :-) and some
years ago I used to say that one can write a readable and modular
program in assembly language or an unreadable and non modular one in
Pascal...

Eric
-- 
Rendez-vous à Paris.
                          http://www.technoforum.fr/integ2002/index.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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• References:
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    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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