[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: RDF Sample, ICAO Airport Codes
James Robertson writes: > Wouldn't a validatable format with a DTD > be more useful for storing data? > > ie. plain vanilla XML? Why not just ASCII? > Otherwise, aren't we advocating abandoning XML for a > another format? One that loses the ability to be > verified, except with the use of custom-written software. I could write a DTD for my airport example if I wanted, but I see little value; instead, I'd probably use the W3C's proposed RDF-schema language, since it works at the right semantic level. Besides, while DTDs are useful, they allow validation of only a tiny subset of business rules: as I mentioned in a recent discussion within the W3C, a DTD can ensure that HTML <h1> doesn't appear within <p>, but it cannot ensure that the text in it is actually a descriptive section title. > In other words, if RDF is intended for storage of data, > what's XML for? If XML is intended for the representation of documents, what's ASCII for? Good application design (like good system design) requires a layered approach: - if a lot of people need to extract a stream of characters from many different byte encodings, you invent a standard (like Unicode) so that they can all refer to a common set of characters in the abstract; - if a lot of people need to extract a tree structure from a stream of characters, you invent a standard (like SGML or XML) so that they can all use standard software tools rather than rolling their own; - if a lot of people need to relabel the tree nodes with universally-identifiable and unique names, you invent a standard (like Namespaces in XML or Architectural Forms) so that they can all use standard software tools rather than rolling their own; - if a lot of people need to extract a set of objects from the tree, you invent a standard (like RDF or XMI) so that they can all use standard software tools rather than rolling their own. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 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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