Cart
|
[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Elliotte Rusty Harold on Web Services
 On Mon, 3 Feb 2003 09:05:58 -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...> wrote: > I don't believe that. I specifically don't believe there are alternative > syntaxes for the Infoset (of if there are, they're not XML) I think this is probably the most important meta-issue that the "XML" world has to face. If a fork occurs, this will probably be the rock that it forks around, because the W3C has already build two classes of Recommendations -- those built on the Infoset (DOM [sortof], XPath/XSLT/XQuery, XSDL, and SOAP) and those built on the syntax. But this is a permathread, and we've all stated our positions numerous times. I don't think the "alternative syntaxes aren't XML" position is demonstrated in the real world, FWIW, whatever its philosophical merits. The classic example is that you can use DOM in a browser (if you're careful) irrespective of whether the input document is XHTML, valid HTML, or tag soup that the browser "fixed up" into an Infoset. Other examples are the various SAX parsers for non-XML syntaxes that generate documents that can be transformed with XSLT (see www.wikiml.org for one example, if memory serves). XQuery is designed to (and empirically can, in a demo that Dare was showing at XML 2002) query an infoset that is concretely realized in an SQL database as if it were "XML". If some tool turns a syntax into a form that DOM and XSLT can work with, it passes the XML "smell test" as far as I'm concerned. We could argue about whether these are best practices or good things, but they exist. > > I also think its important for there to be a plethora of languages. One > language does not fit all. Competition is good. I do not believe in the > centralized "There can be only one" philosophy. I certainly agree with this! To fork, or to accomodate, should be made on pragmatic rather than philosophical or marketing grounds. If the data- markup-language and the text-markup-language don't really share all that much, they should fork. But let's not do this lightly... remember that long list of things one gets "for free" with XML because it is universally supported. If half (ahem, more like 90%) of the vendors and customers fork off to something new, hard-core XML people will long for the good old days when the data-oriented people were whining about DTDs and PIs rather than ignoring XML completely. :-) 
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! 
Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|
|||||||||
