[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: is XML complete?
"Simon St.Laurent" wrote: > Are there more issues like Character Entities waiting to surface? Or > (apart from that issue) can XML declare victory and call itself complete? Good question. In my opinion the answer depends on whether we have exhausted ourselves with arguments over processing models or are, in fact, finally going to face up to defining in XML specification terms what happens after the parse. The mention, and the promise, of an XML processor clearly seen as something beyond the parse appears throughout the XML 1.0 Rec. Except for WXS and XSLT, the XML technologies which you review are all about aspects of the parse. I regard them all as effectively marshalling functions: various aspects of processing which might be invoked to prepare something very like a stream of SAX events to move on toward the 'real' processor. Some of these technologies certainly appear to come earlier or later in that marshalling. The character entities discussion essentially foundered on the unyielding rock of missing entity declarations being a well-formedness rather than a validity error. That is, the problem is identified, and causes its consequences, too early in the marshalling process for something like your ents processing to be its recovery mechanism. XInclude arguments typically turn on where in the relative order of marshalling the includes are to be executed. Even the recent HLink/XLink brouhaha was in large part about the use of the structural or addressing (presumably earlier marshalling) versus presentation (presumably later) feature of the two proposals. The mismatches of XPath syntax for what XQuery wants to achieve come down to the same questions of what takes precedence in the marshalling, even if the arguments are usually couched in terms of abstract document/data models. Even WXS is really about functions which might be invoked in marshalling, even though they seem clearly to come very late in the process, providing final decoration to produce a PSVI. And XLST is so closely tied to the specific form in which the output of the parse is marshalled that, though it might provide processing beyond the parse, it does not do it at very much of a distance. I agree with your implication that we may have gone about as far as we can in tinkering with the marshalling functions aggregated in the parse. I do think that the next job--and one which may give us enough perspective to solve some of the remaining irritants and miscoordinations of the marshalling components--is to look at the de-marshalling that needs to be part of the post-parse processor. Respectfully, Walter Perry
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