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Re: Principles of XML design

• To: Joe English <jenglish@f...>
• Subject: Re: Principles of XML design
• From: Liam Quin <liam@w...>
• Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 14:48:07 -0400
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <200505052313.j45NDiK07174@f...>
• References: <1115333449.13308.140.camel@borgia> <1115325327.13308.98.camel@borgia> <427AA198.90604@o...> <200505052313.j45NDiK07174@f...>
• User-agent: Mutt/1.5.9i

On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 04:13:44PM -0700, Joe English wrote:
> Not so weird.  As far as I can tell, other than well-formedness
> and validity errors the XML Rec places no constraints at all on
> what data a processor must report.  That's what the Infoset Rec
> is for.

This is a widely held view of the Infoset.  Officially, however,
the XML Information Set specification only defines a vocabulary:
that is, "if an XML processer returns the name of an element,
this is what you should call the thing that's returned", and so
on for many other items.  The XML Information Set is not exhaustive:
there are XML processors that return things to which the spec has
not assigned a name.  Neither is it mandatory: many XML processors
return a subset of the items listed there.

The informal term "an infoset" meaning "the result of parsing an
XML document and building some sort of different representation,
such as an in-memory graph" is not explicitly licensed by the
Infoset specification, but has led to some people imagining that
the Infoset is intended to define some sort of data model or API.

This is not the case.

Best,

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/

• References:
  • Re: Principles of XML design
    • From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
  • Principles of XML design
    • From: Uche Ogbuji <Uche.Ogbuji@f...>
  • Re: Principles of XML design
    • From: Bob Foster <bob@o...>
  • Re: Principles of XML design
    • From: Joe English <jenglish@f...>

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