[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Identifying XML Document Types (was XML media types revisited)
At 03:12 PM 1/15/99 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote: > >With XML the expectations (for being able to process documents with both >specific and generic tools) are much higher, yet the tools for identifying >document types are actually weaker in many ways. I'm not sure that things are all that bad. An Excel spreadsheet can be a lot of different things, but it is always parsed the same way. Word documents or FrameMaker documents may use different templates, but the file format is the same. MIME types do a fine job at that level. More ambitious schemes for description become more and more application specific. For example, my application is reading XML so that our search engine can index it. The document features that are important to a search engine are not specified in DTDs, style-sheets, schemas, or anything else. We need to know which element is the title, which is the description, and whether some parts of the document are more important for search purposes (a bibliography is less important, a problem description might be more important). The search engine does not care whether the document is valid or has a DTD at all, but it does care whether XLink is used in the document (namespaces do help in this case). Documents are often put to unexpected uses--indexing for search, legal discovery, corpus linguistics, whatever. Committing to a document description too early can actually make a document harder to use. In case you're curious, the search engine is a commercial product (Ultraseek Server), and has supported simple XML searching since last September. wunder Walter R. Underwood wunder@i... wunder@b... (home) http://www.best.com/~wunder/ 1-408-543-6946 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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