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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome fr
 Ronald Bourret wrote: > This assumes that "XML" refers to the serialization format alone. For > most of us, XML refers to the whole spectrum of things XML, from XQuery > to XML Schemas to DOM trees. The fact is that binary XML seeks to > exploit all of these things except the serialization format. Not really. It varies from one binary XML proposal to the next, but many subset XML by, for instance, removing the document type declaration and DTDs. Others superset XML by allowing the presence of arbitrary binary data including characters like null that are simply not legal in XML. Even if we leave the serialization format aside (which basically means we're leaving XML aside) these are still not XML. > While there is a real worry about the balkanization of exchange formats, > the reuse of common document models, query languages, schema languages, > and so on seems to be Good Thing, as it allows all of these technologies > to be reused. Reuse of common document models, query languages, schema languages, and so forth is good. However, if we have to warp them from their original intended purpose of handling XML to fit models that don't have types on attributes, or allow null character data, or the other weird things we see off in the binary space, then they become more complex and less useful. One of the nastiest problems that arises in practice is that these tools begin creating and describing document that cannot possibly be serialized as well-formed XML. The infoset is a particular offender here, and its problems tend to infect downstream specifications. That's why I'm much more comfortable working from real XML documents than some abstract, infoset formulation. > For me one of the most interesting posts to xml-dev in the recent past > was the use of XPath in the UNIX find utility. On the one hand, this has > nothing to do with XML. On the other hand, it's a pretty nice reuse of > technology that came out of XML in a non-XML environment. It is > particularly easy to imagine XML query languages being used in any > number of such non-XML environments, especially when it is easy to > define a simple, canonical mapping from those environments to XML, as > was done in the find case. A question raised in this case demonstrated very well the problem of trying to fit XML tools into non-XML scenarios they were never designed for. A Unix or Windows file name is not an XML name. How does this tool handle file names that contain spaces? I never saw an answer, though perhaps I just missed it. I don't think this question can be answered without breaking either XPath or the file system. One has to be forced to fit the other, and either way the result is brittle and ugly. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@m... XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim 
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