[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Object-oriented serialization (Was Re: Some questions)
Matthew Gertner writes: > The aspects of > object-oriented design that are missing are then inheritance and > polymorphism. In my opinion, things may be more simple. If SGML/XML had not been designed by people living in a typeless world (text documents), XML could have provided a much better medium to express object instances, with such a simple design as getting rid of element contents, and allowing attributes contents to be XML, e.g: <Point x=<Length unit="inches" value="12"/> y=<Length unit="cm" value="2"/> color=<RGB R=<Number base="16" value="FF"/> G="0" B="0"/> /> matching a C/C++/Java... declaration of Point as: Point { Length x; Length y; Color color; }; As you can see, this would be a very elegant and natural way to express object instances (aka serialization). One would of course need a schema language on top of that (to express what I wrote in a C-like declaration), but having to tweak the "low-level" serialisation to fit in the current XML1.0 recomendation is I think the original sin of XML, which pollutes a lot of the discussions I see here. For instance the current drive for removing attributes results from this. But, just like RDF, we could standardise on this non-XML-1.0-compatible (lets call it GXML for Generalized XML :-) representation, and devise a canonical way to express it in XML. For instance: <Point> <_x><Length unit="inches" value="12"/></_x> <_y><Length unit="cm" value="2"/></_y> <_color><RGB G="0" B="0"> <_R><Number base="16" value="FF"/></_R> </_color> </Point> but we could devise others... -- Colas Nahaboo, Koala/Dyade/Bull @ INRIA Sophia, http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas 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 unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe 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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