[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: The triples datamodel -- was Re: SemanticWeb per
At 10:21 AM -0700 6/4/04, Howard Katz wrote: >I don't understand this last point, Elliotte. How can a properly designed >application ask whether a document contains the information it needs without >knowing about the document's structure? If you add information, you're most >likely changing the structure, and consequently the schema. How can an >application cope with ad hoc changes like that w/out looking at the schema, >ie without doing validation? Let me answer with an example. Suppose you want to extract today's news from Cafe con Leche, an invalid XHTML document. The following XPath will do it: //html:today (assuming the html prefix has been bound to the XHTML namespace in whatever environment you're using). You need to know nothing else about what surrounds the today element, where it's positioned in the document, or even how many today elements there are. You don't care what the today elements contain. You don't care what contains them. It is a very robust solution, much more so than solutions based on explicit knowledge that the today element is the seventh child of a td element that is is the first child of a tr element that is the first child of a table element that is a child of the only table element that is the second child of a body element that is the only body child of an html element which is the root element of the document. At no point do you need to know the scheme for the page in order to extract information from it. Indeed if you tried to do that, you'd fail because the page is invalid and the relevant information is found in elements that don't even exist in the schema. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@m... Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003) http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
|
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
|