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Sean McGrath wrote: > Article entitiled "Speaking XML" by Adam Bosworth: > http://www.fawcette.com/xmlmag/2002_12/magazine/columns/endtag/ > > I'm intrigued by "it is becoming increasingly necessary for developers to > directly access and manipulate XML documents." > > My reading of the article suggests that "direct access" here means "lets make > the XML a direct serialization syntax for objects" Yes, Sean, I fear that you have understood only too well the implications and, worse, the only imperfectly-realized premises on which Bosworth speaks. For example: "Language has nothing even remotely equivalent to mixed content, for example." I assume that 'language' here is synecdoche for 'computer programming languages', which is of course a vastly different matter. Mixed content is the very meat of natural languages, and for that matter of poetry, whether the admixture is of verbal time, aspect, or mood. Perhaps the most fascinating characteristic of the variety in human language is the myriad ways in which they deal idiosyncratically--but deal beyond a doubt--with the mixed content of human syntax, semantics, and ultimately communication. Calling Bosworth to task on this is not a quibble: if you're going to deal with XML and not just an eviscerated subset for programming weenies who are are infinitesimal fraction of the users of language, then at the very least you owe the XML user and developer community the courtesy not to conflate your cranky subset with the much broader principles and ultimately syntactic characteristics which many of us make the daily effort to accord respect and obedience. Likewise, "Mapping XML into program data structures inherently risks losing semantics and even data because any unexpected annotations may be stripped out or the schema may be simply too flexible for the language", has the place of syntax and semantics exactly backwards. Mapping XML into any schematic structure is a process, not an abstract equation nor even a simple declaration. To map is to instantiate a particular form of data structure. What the semantics of the resulting populated structure might be are far more the consequence of the process which does the instantiation, the selection of data (not necessarily entirely, or even at all, from the ostensible source document), and the particular aspect and perspective necessarily reflected in the schematic of the target data structure itself than they are the product of anything absent or present in the ostensible source. In other words, the mapping or instantiation of data necessarily add, more precisely elaborates, semantics; it does not subtract from them. Respectfully, Walter Perry
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