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Re: Article: "The horror of XML"

• To: Richard Tobin <richard@c...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Article: "The horror of XML"
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 14:02:19 -0500
• In-reply-to: <200210301849.SAA00083@m...>
• References: <200210301849.SAA00083@m...>

At 6:49 PM +0000 10/30/02, Richard Tobin wrote:


>So how would *you* define something like SOAP?  In BNF? Some specs
>(SMIL was one I think) did this and then found that it wasn't quite
>the same as XML.

I think plain well-formed XML works well enough. There's no need to 
reinvent your own grammar.

>  Using everyday terms like "element" and "attribute"?
>The infoset is just a standard terminology for that.

No, it's not and that's the problem.Infosets can be constructed that 
cannot be serialized. A single element in an infoset can have 23 
different attributes with the same name. In the infoset an element 
name can be composed of nothing but white space. The infoset does not 
promise well-formedness. It is not necessarily tied to an actual XML 
document. About the only thing the infoset actually inherits from XML 
1.0 is the tree structure. All the other constraints are missing.

>Using your own
>data model like XPath?  You could just as well say that XSLT doesn't
>imply XML syntax, it can use anything that produces an XPath data
>model...

Unlike the infoset, the XPath data model is tied to namespace 
well-formed XML. That would make it superior though I still think 
simple XML documents are adequate. I don't think compressing them or 
encrypting them would be a problem. Just define the operation on what 
happens after they're decompressed and decrypted. The SOAP processor 
would still receive a namespace well-formed XML 1.0 document. Passing 
DOM objects around is a little trickier, but I think that's 
acceptable provided that the object adheres to all XML 1.0 
constraints (not all DOMs do).
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

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  • Re: Article: "The horror of XML"
    • From: Richard Tobin <richard@c...>

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