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Re: Remembering the original XML vision

• To: David Megginson <david@m...>
• Subject: Re: Remembering the original XML vision
• From: Bill de hÓra <bill@d...>
• Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 17:35:52 +0000
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <5.1.0.14.0.20030213121839.03083488@m...> <5.2.0.9.0.20030215082258.03f498d8@n...> <15950.23561.33151.598867@m...>
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David Megginson wrote:

 > Aside from those minor problems, though, the main difficulty with XML
 > is precisely what Jonathan says -- it is meant for both documents and
 > data, and as a result, is optimized for neither.  What we need is not
 > a new, simpler XML, but separate, more specialized layers on top of
 > XML for data and documents (**).  RDF, Topic Maps, and the SOAP
 > serialization format all represent candidates for a standard data
 > layer; unofficially, XHTML and DocBook are often used as the 
bases for
 > building more specialized documentation formats.  Maybe we need
 > something simpler than any of that to start with.

We have two prescribed layers already:

   1: Infoset + W3C Schema + QNames
   2: RDF + Model Theory + URIs

They're tuples of models in the form (data, typing, naming). You can 
throw XML out tommorow and run with both or either of those two. The 
likes of SOAP and OWL come in above those again.

The difficulty is bad engineering on top of XML, and a lack of 
appreciation about what the benefits of using XML syntax as a 
carrier are. There's no difficulty with XML.

Bill de hÓra

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Remembering the original XML vision
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

• References:
  • Re: New tool for handling XML in Java
    • From: Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@p...>
  • Remembering the original XML vision
    • From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>
  • re: Remembering the original XML vision
    • From: David Megginson <david@m...>

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