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RE: XUL Compact Syntax Study Now Online - Is XML too hardfor A

• To: Bob Wyman <bob@w...>
• Subject: RE: XUL Compact Syntax Study Now Online - Is XML too hardfor Aunt Trudie?
• From: Norman Gray <norman@a...>
• Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 17:49:15 +0100 (BST)
• Cc: "'Bullard, Claude L (Len)'" <clbullar@i...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <003e01c427b8$1a729880$650aa8c0@BOBDEV>
• References: <003e01c427b8$1a729880$650aa8c0@BOBDEV>

Bob,

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Bob Wyman wrote:

> 	No. Not really. You just got caught in the cross-fire of the
> meta-discussion. What you have done, mapping to and from SAX events,
> is a correct way to approach this problem. Because you have done this,
> it means, in theory, that I am completely shielded from your syntax.
> i.e. I can read it with the same tools that I might be reading XML and
> if I really want to, I should be able to convert it either to XML or
> to some other syntax of my own choosing.

Indeed.  Very much so.  Your description of the ALL-IN-1 editor does
sound sweet, and exactly the sort of thing that the Infoset makes
possible.

I remember being rather inspired by a description of TechnoTeacher's
GroveMinder.  Similarly to your editor, you define all your processing on
the grove/infoset, which means you don't have to care where the assorted
input groves come from.  They could come from pointy-bracket-land, or
databases, or some sort of funky custom back-end, and the grove/infoset
processor doesn't have to either know or care!

This did promote the rather nice view that DSSSL wasn't a mapping of
elements to elements, but from groves to groves.  That will have led
directly into the specification of XSL as a mapping from Infoset to
Infoset.  That appeals to me.  But it's yet another can of worms.

> 	One problem: SAX isn't Infoset. Thus, there are some
> limitations to your mappings that might have been better addressed by
> mapping to Infoset. Ideally, SAX would map to Infoset as well and thus
> give you the mapping to and from XML or any other syntax derived from
> Infoset.

Pity.  ASN.1 or the infoset might be a project for the future; but for
now, SAX was what XT and javax.xml.transform.Transformer wanted, so SAX
was what they got....  (well, I could have used DOM, but there's yet
another worm-can).

All the best,

Norman


-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norman Gray                        http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/
Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK     norman@a...

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  • RE: XUL Compact Syntax Study Now Online - Is XML too hard for Aunt Trudie?
    • From: "Bob Wyman" <bob@w...>

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