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RE: [ Revision #2 ] 15 elementary truths about XML

• From: "David Lee" <dlee@calldei.com>
• To: "'Costello, Roger L.'" <costello@mitre.org>, <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2011 08:01:51 -0700

First, my +(N+1) on accepting all honest XML related posts on this list
regardless of our opinion of them.  I personally have enjoyed some of the
side effects triggered by the questions Roger has raised in the past.    I
personally do not consider him a "Troll".
A "Troll" is someone who maliciously intends to disrupt a list by feeding
incisive or annoying commentary with the intent of annoying people or better
yet incite others to annoy each other ('flame war').     Well enough of that
! 

Now for my own;  I disagree with this slightly:

>> 2. As noted above there are no characters in a computer, only bytes.
Thus, "An XML document is a sequence of characters" actually means that an
XML document is an abstraction >> of the underlying sequence of bytes.


To me this implies XML has to be both 
A) On a computer
B) In a text serialized form in bytes

I'm actually not sure since I haven't reread the specs with this in mind but
my opinion is that neither are requirements.

A)  If I print or write on paper or whiteboard "<XML/>" is that not still
"XML" ?  I don't expect a "XML Processor" to be able to read it, but is not
"not XML" just because its in some other media ? And not represented by
bytes and bits.

B) There is a large body of practice where XML never ends up in text
serialized form in 'bytes'.    Not referring to Infoset or XDM.   But rather
in-memory "strings" of text serialized XML.
Say a Java program dynamically creates an XML text message, in a Java String
and parses it in memory.   No where has it been converted to any encoding in
bytes.
Yet it is still "XM".

So I would say more clearly "XML Is an abstraction of a sequence of
characters" but not necessarily is there 'underlying bytes'.




----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: [ Revision #2 ] 15 elementary truths about XML
    • From: Norm Birkett <Norm.Birkett@reval.com>

• References:
  • [ Revision #2 ] 15 elementary truths about XML
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>