[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Compound Documents - necessary for success?
Could we discuss the pros and cons of compound documents? First let me define what I mean by "compound document": compound-document ::= (compound-document | valid-document) valid-document ::= <a document that conforms to a schema> In words, a compound document is a "document of documents", where each document conforms to a schema; i.e, a nested document conforms to a schema as well as does its parent document. I will use the term composition and compound document interchangeably. I would like to make two assertions: (1) Compound documents are necessary for the success of XML. (2) Focusing on inheritance is of lesser importance than focusing on composition. I base these assertions upon an analogy to objects in programming languages. Suppose that we consider a document to be analogous to a programming object. Clearly, programming objects can be composed of objects; i.e., objects within objects. Object composition enables separation of concerns, extensibility, all the "ilities". Each (well-written) object is independent, with a well defined interface, and verifiable (with a compiler). Programming languages that did not support object composition would be intolerable. Analogously, documents should be composable, where each document is independently verifiable. Also the object community has come to the consensus that composition (black box reuse) enables more robust development than does inheritance (white box reuse). Analogously, I would assert that the focus in XML should be on enabling compound documents rather than on enabling inheritance. Thoughts/discussion? /Roger 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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