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Re: The subsetting has begun

• To: XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: The subsetting has begun
• From: "W. E. Perry" <wperry@f...>
• Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 11:09:23 -0500
• Organization: Fiduciary Automation
• References: <5.1.0.14.0.20030305130907.0203a598@m...>

Sean McGrath wrote:

> It is the XML parser that attempts to map the UnicodeWithAngleBrackets to the
> productions in XML 1.0.

Absolutely.

> Those productions form a tree rooted at production [1].

Not of themselves they don't. This abstraction often is a useful guide for
instantiating a data structure upon the output of the parse of an XML instance
document. Any such instantiation, however, is not the necessary outcome of a
parse and, in fact, can be divined in the original instance only
retrospectively, in light of the concrete instantiation which follows the
parse.

Syntax is syntax, and documents are its natural collection, a truism enshrined
in production [1]. The execution of process is required to elaborate semantics
from syntax on a particular occasion, and in the processing of XML that
occasion is generally a parse. Any such semantics are not the only possible
elaboration from a particular syntactic instance and, in fact, say nothing
about the inherent nature of that syntactic instance. They are merely one
outcome of processing it. Even less does some abstraction--a tree, for
example--inferred from the concrete instantiation of data on the output of a
particular parse say anything about the inherent nature of the syntactic
instance input to that parse. The semantics of the instantiated data structure,
including abstract understandings of that structure itself, are derivative of
the processes which produce that structure. The operation of those processes is
unidirectional and once executed such a process creates no commutative
relationship between its input and its output which would permit useful insight
into the former to be divined from the apparent nature of the latter.

Respectfully,

Walter Perry

• References:
  • Re: The subsetting has begun
    • From: Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@p...>

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