[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Why the Infoset?
Walter Perry wrote: "I shall therefore withhold further public questioning of the Infoset initiative and hereby apologize to any who feel that I have abused the bandwidth of this list with a rant." I for one did not consider any of what you wrote to be a 'rant' and was dismayed to see such a value judgement enter into the argument. Yours, John F Schlesinger SysCore Solutions 212 619 5200 x 219 917 886 5895 Mobile -----Original Message----- From: W. E. Perry [mailto:wperry@f...] Sent: Monday, July 31, 2000 6:13 AM To: XML DEV Subject: Re: Why the Infoset? John Cowan wrote: > If you want to interpret the following XML documents differently (one per line): > > <foo bar="baz"> > <foo bar='baz'> > <foo bar='baz'> > <foo bar='baz'> > <foo bar="baz"> > > by all means don't let *me* stop you. Before John Cowan's response, I would have replied to Jonathan Borden's assertion > Except for imposing XML namespace conformance, the Infoset places few constraints on an XML document. Indeed > it does not force you to even use XML names, the only constraint is a syntactic one, of explicitly not allowing ':' within element names except as > specified in XML names. > that the advocates of the Infoset do not claim so little for their creature. During the xml-uri debate John Cowan--eloquently, I thought--argued consistently and tenaciously over a very long time that, as editor of the Infoset, he could not finesse the hard questions of interpretation precisely because the Infoset demanded specific semantic resolution of processing issues (see particularly his replies to Simon St.Laurent at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000Jun/0094.html, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000Jun/0128.html and http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000Jun/0469.html). Among what I took to be the specific semantics elaborated by the new Infoset draft, I am particularly troubled by the abstract nature imputed to the concepts parent/child and document order. Syntactically understood, these may be simple physical accidents of the serial nature of documents. Their semantic significance on the occasion of any particular processing, however, may be either less (i.e., for the purposes of the moment, element containment and/or ordinality don't really matter) or very much more (because additional semantics are elaborated from, or demanded by, the processing of links, transforms, etc.) than the property values assigned under the Infoset. Why then insist in the Infoset on particular standard semantics which are likely to be beside the point for the specific, salient semantics of the processing instance? Perhaps I am over-rationalizing and would be better served to resist less, as I have been advised. I shall therefore withhold further public questioning of the Infoset initiative and hereby apologize to any who feel that I have abused the bandwidth of this list with a rant. Respectfully, Walter Perry
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