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From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:ricko@a...] >So the essense of XML is the herd instinct? ;-) There is some truth to that if not definitionally, then empirically. Much depends on what one does with XML as to what one regards as essential (see debates over IDness on TAG and here). Because many do essentially different but overlapping tasks, the definition of what is core to XML, say essential, will typically be contentious. It may be that that is the essence (wide range of application). Sowa claims the essence of XML is syntax: "The major reason why people are using XML is just that a lot of other people who are using it have provided easily available tools for parsing it. But there is nothing about XML that makes it easier to compare two different class models that have been translated into XML. On the contrary, XML is an extremely verbose notation that makes it very difficult for human beings to read anything that has been written in XML. Its only advantage is that there are a lot of computer programs that can read and parse XML. For the purpose of making it easier to compare two different models, translating both of them into XML will only have the effect of making them harder for people to read. That won't facilitate comparison. If you want to compare two models, it is much more important to translate them to some version of logic. Then you can use logical operations to define the semantics of the models. Logic enables you to state rules and definitions that define the underlying concepts and specify the permissible operations and behavior of the things those concepts represent. The reason why logic is better than XML is that logic has semantics. XML by itself only gives you syntax." John F Sowa "CG: Question about CGs and OO concepts" Conceptual Graphs List len
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