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Re: Syntax + object model

• To: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Subject: Re: Syntax + object model
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 10:20:13 -0700
• Cc: "xml-dev@l..." <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <oprpolpdfdezizxn@localhost>
• References: <oprpolpdfdezizxn@localhost>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312

Mike Champion wrote:
> 
> 
>>  Object models are 
>> *local*. Syntax is *global*.
> 
> The success of XSLT, XPath, and the (probable) success of at least the 
> hard core of XQuery is a strong counter-example to this assertion.

It's much simpler than this, I think.  There are two kinds of things you 
do with XML.  First, you use it to interchange data among disparate 
systems. Second, you use it as a basis for processing once you've 
received it.

The first (interchange) scenario has no requirement whatsoever for a 
shared data model: there are a million existence proofs on the ground of 
interoperating applications who defined the syntax, got on with the job, 
and are now in production.

The second (processing) scenario obviously presupposes a data model, 
ranging from the moronically-simple SAX event stream to a detailed 
object model with fully worked out thread-safety and concurrency and so 
on.  The degree to which object models can be shared from one 
programming language to another, or from one OS to another, varies 
wildly.  People are claiming thath XPath model works well for a wide 
variety of processing scenarios.  I'm inclined to believe this based on 
what I've seen so far.

Having said that, I think the interchange usages of XML will for the 
foreseeable future outnumber and outweigh the processing uses.

-- 
Cheers, Tim Bray
         (ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)

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  • Re: Syntax + object model
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

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