[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] XML and embedded compound data types (was "Why XML data typin is hard")
I have been reading the latest postings on XML data typing and want to throw out a different viewpoint. several caveats are that I haven't perused all of the archives to see if I'm tramping down well-worn paths. I am also much more interested in the non-prose uses of XML so take that into account. The perspective is the possibly naive one that XML can/should be used to capture ALL of the structural aspects of a complex tree of data. Wherever a compound type occurs in the source data, it should be mapped to a corresponding compound type in XML. A key heuristic to see if this approach is being adhered to is to see if any attribute values or character data requires additional parsing by the application in order to deserialize additional structure. In the case of a date or float, I would argue that they are both compound types and should be represented as such. If this approach is chosen, you can end up using integers and enumerations (as long as you use attributes). This is obviously much more verbose, but cleanly separates content from presentation. I forget which of the many schema proposals used this approach but at least one did. If you adhere to this approach, alot of the issues of providing inline support for validation of character data (that will require additional parsing by the application) goes away. Many issues of data typing remain, such as how to recognize a valid country name, but these are not structural issues related to compound types hiding inside a human readable serialization format. Gabe Beged-Dov www.jfinity.com xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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