[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: What A Document Means
Hello Peter! Many thanks for your answer. That is the direction I thought they might be headed in with that, but without a reference, I wasn't sure. So it is an infoset. That is a bit vague and doesn't quite tell us why it is an expensive approach, or precisely how it determines a document's "meaning" except insofar as information items are grouped. In other words, we can use the infoset to describe it's meaning as a well-formed document (as document is defined therein), but not the meaning of the content. If that is the scope of the authors of the the paper's intent, that's fine. In short, they have defined the "meaning" of the document to the system, not the meaning of the document to any possible set of endpoints where these endpoints are automated or human processes. I am nonplussed by the definition of a document in terms of the system features (MIME types) because that seems to be a reasonable way to scope the abstraction. You are right about the significance of the last item. It reveals a flaw. The "meaning" of the "document" is not the same to all parts of the system. This has been pointed out before as a flaw in the current XML framework specifications. len -----Original Message----- From: Peter V. Mikhalenko [mailto:xml-dev@s...] Hello, Len! You wrote to <xml-dev@l...> on Mon, 1 Apr 2002 09:50:56 -0600 : BCL> In http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/docmeaning.html BCL> BCL> "The document forms a complete information set. Although expensive BCL> in the general case, it's not entirely unreasonable to imagine BCL> applications that examine an entire information set." BCL> BCL> Can someone explain this? What is an "information set" and how BCL> does one determine "completeness" for two ends of a single BCL> transaction or communication? BCL> BCL> len It seems that the authors use the term "information set" in the meaning of the highest-level document type abstraction; as the XML Information Set Recommendation (http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/) says: "An XML document has an information set if it is well-formed and satisfies the namespace constraints described below. There is no requirement for an XML document to be valid in order to have an information set. Information sets may be created by methods (not described in this specification) other than parsing an XML document. An XML document's information set consists of a number of information items; the information set for any well-formed XML document will contain at least a document information item and several others. An information item is an abstract description of some part of an XML document: each information item has a set of associated named properties. In this specification, the property names are shown in square brackets, [thus]. The terms "information set" and "information item" are similar in meaning to the generic terms "tree" and "node", as they are used in computing. However, the former terms are used in this specification to reduce possible confusion with other specific data models. Information items do not map one-to-one with the nodes of the DOM or the "tree" and "nodes" of the XPath data model." The last piece is the most significant, I think. _
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