[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: more on "subelement significance"
On 01/10/03 4:20 PM, "Seairth Jacobs" <seairth@s...> wrote: > > The usefulness of any given subelement is due to the knowledge of its > namespace, document type, and/or parent element. Without any of the three, > the subelement does not have a useful meaning. > > > Thoughts? I'm with Simon on the convulsions. Here are a few thoughts that jiggled loose. I'm not sure I've come to my senses yet, they seem a bit cluttered, but here goes anyway :-) XML is a data representation. What's the meaning of data? Does data contain its own meaning? There are people who will tell you that you cannot have meaning without a mind. Do we want to go there? Maybe we do, because if this is true, then there is nothing more to discuss. What do 'usefulness' and 'meaning', even 'useful meaning' and 'useful significance', have to do with each other anyway? They certainly are not the same thing. Are you talking about definition rather than meaning? I'm not sure you can get definitions from what you have available in an XML document either (except for the document itself). It seems to me that your first sentence is kind of interesting. For the parent to contribute to the meaning of the child, the parent must have meaning... I think. Anyways, if it does, then it has to get it from its namespace, document type, or parent. So we can substitute, and keep substituting, and, with a bit of factoring, get: namespace, parent's namespace, parent's parent's namespace, ..., or document type. So, we depend on namespaces and a document type for meaning (possibly the root element if we are desperate enough). I don't think this will do for meaning. As an aside <html:a> tells you nothing more than <x:a> or even <a> -- you need the namespace not the qualifier. Here is a very common idiom (at least in my world): <things> <thing/> <thing/> </things> <things> is used to keep <thing>s in one place to aid readability. What meaning does thing get from things? What usefulness is provided to thing by things? There is no namespace here, and I don't have to define a document type. So there is no document type, namespace, or parental meaning in this document. Yet I know that I can assign meaning as I like in the interpretation of the XML (there's that mind thing again). Does the choice of 'thing' for the element name matter? How? I think this last bit has to be considered. What if I showed you this XML document: <root> <things> <thing name="one"/> <thing name="two"/> </things> <people> <person name="Jack"> <owns thing="one"/> </person> <person name="Jill"> <owns thing="two"/> </person> </people> </root> Where did the 'meaning' of <thing> happen for you? Did <things>, <root>, or <people> contribute anything to your understanding? Did the use of English words contribute anything? Consider: <a> <b> <d e='one'/> <d e='two'/> </b> <c> <h i='j'> <l m='one'/> </h> <h i='k'> <l m='two'/> </h> </c> </a> This has the identical 'meaning' in XML as the previous example. It's just that the human interpreter cannot interpret it very well. What if I told you that I have been very successful when mapping XML elements to objects (in Java) -- strictly one-to-one? In my world, an element in XML maps to exactly one object, and each object to a single XML element. What is the meaning of an object in Java? Or the usefulness of an object in Java? Do objects obtain meaning from the things that refer them? How much? Why are you asking this question? I don't think I understand what you are getting at. Actually, I suspect a contributing cause, maybe the real cause, of Simon's convulsions is the certainty that someone would post a message like this one in response. Sorry :-) Cheers, Bob
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