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RE: RE: description of the logical or semantic structure

• To: 'ludger goeke' <ludgergoeke@g...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: RE: description of the logical or semantic structure
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 08:21:11 -0600

In the common human interpretation, the element generic 
identifiers (GIs) name the content of the elements.  
The facts on the ground for software are not that complex 
because that simple sentence belies a very deep and 
complex set of error-prone operations for software, 
so they are deliberately avoided in XML.

The XML processor sees a set of labeled text nodes where the document 
element node generic identifier has the value 'Person' and 
has-a node with a generic identifier whose value is "name" and a 
that node has a sibling element node with a gi whose value 
is 'age'.  The element name and the element age both have 
text nodes of value "Peter Smith" and "56" respectively. 
There is further defaulted information with respect to 
white space.

Beyond this, XML does nothing.  You have to do it and
that can be anything from cutting and pasting by hand 
all the way to writing software to process the output 
of the XML processor.

Now, an application processor receiving the information 
items from the XML processor can interpret these as 
designed.  I am deliberately avoiding the 'semantic' 
term, but it is definitely the case that 'semantic' 
is generally understood to be handling by an application 
processor.   That might be, for example, 
using the gi values as a map to insert or update 
a relational record where the fields/column names 
are Name and Age and the record has a row name of 
Person.  It might be to use the gis as transform 
values to push the text fields into a set of HTML 
list or table items.

It is important to remember this:  XML has no 
content semantics on its own other than the limited 
set required to make XML processors compatible and 
to make some aspects of identification and some 
syntax easier to implement (to get rid of DTDs 
as possible).   Your questions are of the kind 
most often seen when someone is trying to make 
XML itself do more than it does.  It does very little 
and that is deliberate.

len


From: ludger goeke [mailto:ludgergoeke@g...]

for example I got the following xml-document 


 <!DOCTYPE  Person [ 
<!ELEMENT Person (Name, Age)>
<!ELEMENT Name(#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT Age(#PCDATA)>
]>
 
<Person>
   <Name>Peter Smith</Name>
   <Age>56</Age>
</Person>


Does the markup describes  the content for example  "Peter Smith" in a
semantic way, that means does it describes that 
the content "Peter Smith" has the semantic of a name ? Or describes the
markup the logical role of the content "Peter Smith" 
and a the processing Software adds the semantic ?

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