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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Why XML? RE: Why the Infoset?
 W. E. Perry wrote: [lots of rant deleted] > The Infoset is the unfortunate standard to which those in retreat > from the radical > and most useful implications of well-formedness have rallied. At > its core the > Infoset insists that there is 'more' to XML than the > straightforward syntax of > well-formedness. By imposing its canonical semantics the Infoset > obviates the > infinite other semantic outcomes which might be elaborated in > particular unique > circumstances from an instance of well-formed XML 1.0 syntax. How does the Infoset constrain semantics? 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. And since XML 1.0 warned against this, surely this cannot qualify as a meaningful constraint. So, if you don't ever use a colon in an element or attribute name, and you don't use any element or attribute names which begin with 'xml' and your documents are all well-formed, how does the Infoset interfere with anything you are doing? It simply doesn't. It places *no* constraints on you. And in another message: [lots more rant deleted] > I (and the philosophy of WF, I > assert) want these > universalities to be determined by the processor as appropriate > for the particular > circumstances in which a document instance is processed. Why XML then? What is so special about well-formnedness. I assert that any information you can supply in a well-formed document, I can supply in a non-well formed document. If you personally have no use for, or cannot understand the use for an infoset, fine. It doesn't constrain you in any way. Tell me this, when you take an XML file and insert it into an XML repository is it still XML? Some people would say that the repository, perhaps an object database, or perhaps some other type of database, holds an internal format which represents the XML infoset of the document and is accessable via the DOM. Some people find this type of processing useful, and for these people the Infset is useful. True, the DOM spec was written prior to the Infoset spec, but I think that the only reason this was possible is because of all the work on groves and property sets that had already been done for SGML, so the people who devised the DOM already had a pretty good idea of what the Infoset would look like. If you don't have any use for DOM processing, or things like XPath, or XPointer, or even SAX, then don't worry about the Infoset, it won't affect you. No one is forcing you to read any spec which was written either before or after XML 1.0. Jonathan Borden 
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