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I've been pondering various infosets lately, wondering if it's possible for us to 'all just get along'. The transition from clean labeled structures to clean labeled typed structures seems to be producing a lot of conflict along the way, and I'm starting to wondering if maybe it's time for a lateral move. (Yes, I know that's Rick Jelliffe's specialty, but I'll give it a try.) It seems to me that a lot of the issues surrounding the PSVI are tied to the mixing of type description and constraints assignment. Schema validation is validation against a set of rules, and also adds information about typing to the document. It seems like it would be useful to have a mean of identifying types in documents which doesn't involve defining those types and which doesn't rely on validation processing per se to get work done. Henry's complained that W3C XML Schema's competitors don't address this issue, so perhaps it would be a worthwhile supplement. CSS already uses a 'painting' approach with formatting, and RDF seems capable of doing similar things as metadata. I can't say that I would mind seeing something like: invoice {type:invoice;} invoice invoiceNum {type:integer;} invoice date {type:date;} invoice item {type:item;} to use ad hoc CSS syntax as I sit here at a payphone on a 7.2bps connection. Seems like there'd be a lot of room to run with this, and it could be genuinely useful in a wide variety of cases. Simon St.Laurent Associate Editor O'Reilly and Associates
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