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Re: The subsetting has begun

• To: XML Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: The subsetting has begun
• From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 22:10:42 -0500
• In-reply-to: <3E5ABD9B.2050600@d...>
• References: <B885BEDCB3664E4AB1C72F1D85CB29F804B54D2C@R...><3E5ABD9B.2050600@d...>
• User-agent: Opera7.0/Win32 M2 build 2637

On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 00:49:31 +0000, Bill de hÓra <bill@d...> wrote:


> Sure thing. But we'd be all well served not muddying XML with XML 
> Infosets.

For better or worse XPath/XSLT and DOM dumped a lot of mud into the water 
very shortly after the XML 1.0 syntax spec came out. I really don't think 
there's any point in longing for the pristine waters of pure XML, unless of 
course you want to get rid of XPath, XSLT, DOM ... along with XSDL, SOAP, 
XQuery, and a bunch of other stuff that many people here WOULD like to get 
rid of :-)

I'm sure there's a few thousand people out there who would be happy users 
of pure syntax XML tools such as SAX, and maybe the databinding specs could 
be tweaked to support DTDs and RELAX NG rather than XSDL, and that might 
make the syntax a bit more accessible to ordinary programmers.  But it 
seems to me that if you want to toss out all the flavors of Infosets, the 
XML party is pretty much over for the vast majority of users.

In other words, it's not going to happen, so what's the point of wishing it 
would?  I wish people would just acknowledge that the XML syntax and 
Infoset(s) were joined at birth (every well-formed XML document can be 
parsed into a tree). Then maybe we could do what has to be done to make the 
actual Infoset spec more useful (e.g., by making the language less awkward, 
such as "element" rather than "element information item" [gag]), and making 
it as formally rigorous as the syntax spec (somebody said that this could 
be done with ASN.1, but I don't know that).   My wish sounds about as 
futile as Bill's wish for pristine waters, I fear.   

• Follow-Ups:
  • pure XML syntax tools
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
  • Re: The subsetting has begun
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: The subsetting has begun
    • From: =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Bill_de_h=D3ra?= <bill@d...>
  • Re: The subsetting has begun
    • From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>

• References:
  • RE: The subsetting has begun
    • From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>
  • Re: The subsetting has begun
    • From: Bill de hÓra <bill@d...>

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