[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Object-oriented serialization (Was Re: Some questions)
I think you're mixing apples and oranges. An even simpler declaration of your example below -- and correct in XML -- would be: <Point value="12in,2cm;RFFx,G0,B0" /> or: <processingsegment lang="Java" content="Point {Length x; Length y; Color color;};" /> or: <? Java Point {Length x; Length y; Color color;}; ?> XML is a storage medium. Java source code is a storage medium. XML may contain Java source code syntax, as Java source code may contain XML syntax, but both need processors to do more. And by the way, SGML grew out of a world of extremely limited and narrowly typed data processing _and_ fixed length records. Data typing in SGML is as simple as adding an attribute to an element declaration. It is up to a processor to know how to use it. Just as it is in Java. Vane -----Original Message----- From: Colas Nahaboo [mailto:Colas.Nahaboo@s...] 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...) 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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