[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML-aware programming language?
On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 07:50:12AM -0500, Elliotte Harold wrote: > This is *a* data model. It is not *the* data model. There is no one XML > data model, and there will not be. I certainly think that's true for the forseeable future. "Never is a long word, even for an ent", but... People doing a lot of work in DOM might find it very natural; people programming with GConf might find that model natural; people using JDOM or SAX or XML::Simple or XML::Twig might find those models more convenient. Someone using XML::Simple would find moving to a DOM-style API (based on trees rather than unordered hashes) a major change to the complexity of the code. The simpler data model doesn't work for arbitrary XML, but it makes the programming easy enough that people were happy to use XML for configuration files instead of inventing their own formats. The value of XML is that people can interchange structured data without limiting or defining exactly how that data is to be processed. The extent to which XML documents are self-describing is the extent to which people can take XML documents and process them in new ways. Part of that processing is to build and manipulate some sort of data structure, defined by a set of types and operations and often called a data model. There's no limit to the number of different ways in which a given piece of XML can be processed. So it's a strength of XML that there is no single data model and no single API. Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/
|
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
|