[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: atoms, molecules
At 08:25 PM 4/17/01 -0400, Steve Rosenberry wrote: >Noah's main justification against the proposal came down to this: > >=== > >"The XML Recommendation itself is very clear that [1]: "Terseness in XML >markup is of minimal importance." While individual cases require >judgment, it seems a mistake in general to try and use schemas to undo >this stylistic decision. ... > >[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-origin-goals" Uh, okay, so why not require everyone to use markup like: <date><year>1970</year><month>11</month><day>25</day></date> >I choose these other XML goals as justification for datatypes as regular >expression atoms: > > 2. XML shall support a wide variety of applications. > 6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear. > 9. XML documents shall be easy to create. > >Goals 6 and 9 are in direct competition with goal 10 which Noah >referenced. As for goal 2, the reason I am specifically looking at XML >as a solution is that I can define my own application specific language >that comes with a strong already written parser. By adding parser >constructs that simplify and clarify my specific language, my users gain >more benefits from goals 6 and 9. Yep. And by making it possible to access that information in multiple environments, you preserve a lot of the interoperability that XML promises. Working with atoms lets us avoid a lot of not-very-portable application code. >On the other hand and in the interest of fairness, all the features that >everyone in the XML community keeps adding on top of the original XML >spec (Schema, SOAP, etc...) contradicts another of the original XML >goals: > > 5. The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the > absolute minimum, ideally zero. > >I guess that's why we keep creating new names for all these other >features... Heh. I'm afraid I agree, and I've always found XML 1.0 itself to have too many options. Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed. XHTML: Migrating Toward XML http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books
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