[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: The subsetting has begun
"Alaric B. Snell" wrote: > It's not a DAG; you can't share subtrees. It's a tree! [also doing too much attention-getting hand waving, I'm afraid, but anyway:] The XML instance is neither a tree nor a directed acyclic graph. That's the inherent point of XML as UnicodeWithAngleBrackets. You can instantiate the output of a parse of that instance as a tree, a DAG, a full grove or any of many arboretical forms. Parsers which presume a single particular form of concrete instantiation following the parse of syntax are really parsers plus XML processors. Such bundled processors first go astray in assuming that there somehow inheres in the XML instance a model intended by the creator which must be faithfully instantiated by the recipient. In narrow, particular applications of XML this is in fact the premise. In the general case, however, the parse a) verifies that the instance as received is properly XML and b) provides its output as suitable input to a particular local processor which as its first task must instantiate a data structure suited to the local use of the XML instance. Gavin has said it in a succinct form which is hard to improve on (perhaps even as a sutra defining the nature of XML): ***The generic XML processor is a myth once you get past the syntax.*** Respectfully, Walter Pery
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