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On Friday 17 January 2003 03:34 pm, Dare Obasanjo wrote: > Objects have methods and objects can have circular references. > Representing those in plain vanilla XML (i.e. no DTDs or schema) is an > immense challenge without resorting to what some would colorfully > describe as "gross hacks". I don't get it. In DOM XML markup is used to define interfaces. A little more imaginative thought can extend that to objects, including full expression representation to the point that I could do a bidirectional transformation between Java/C# and an XML representation which could be compiled or interpreted just as effectively as either of the other two (though it'd be a pain to write). I have done something like this in the past (first in 1995/1996 or so actually, so a bit before XML ;-)) If you talk about instantiated object graphs, the XML object reader and writer code in JDK 1.3 shows that it's not all *that* hard to even serialize the entire application state to XML, and to then reinstantiate it into a runtime representation later, and I wouldn't call either the code, or the serialization a "gross hack". Like ConciseXML, it's meaningless to say "XML can do this, but not that" or "XML is limited in this way". XML has nothing to do with it: it's the applications that *use* XML that decide what it can and cannot do.
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