[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

RE: The Rising Sun: How XML Binary Restored the Fortune s of

• To: elharo@m...
• Subject: RE: The Rising Sun: How XML Binary Restored the Fortune s of Innovators
• From: Alessandro Triglia <sandro@m...>
• Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2005 01:31:11 +0200 (CEST)
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...] 
> Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2005 08:35
> To: Alessandro Triglia
> Cc: 'Bullard, Claude L (Len)'; 'xml-dev'
> Subject: Re:  The Rising Sun: How XML Binary 
> Restored the Fortune s of Innovators
> 
> 
> Alessandro Triglia wrote:
> 
> > 
> > I am not asserting that all producers of XML fit the above 
> description, but
> > I like thinking that a lot of them do.   Otherwise, it 
> would be hard to
> > understand the significance of the XML infoset, the 
> significance of SAX, the
> > significance of XML Schema, etc.  The XML infoset is 
> important, isn't it?
> 
> No, I don't think it is. Outside of the small community of 
> spec writers 
> and some implementers, it's hard to think of anybody who really cares 
> about or even understands the XML infoset. Developers care about the 
> data models exposed by DOM, SAX, XPath, etc. 


However, I still believe that there are many **producers** of XML who, in fact, care only
about the "infoset" portion of the XML they produce.  In other words, they:

- don't need the ability to use general entity references

- don't need the freedom to choose the nature and amount of whitespace
inside tags

- don't need the freedom to choose between a starttag/endtag pair or an
empty element tag

- don't need the freedom to choose between apostrophe and quote for
attributes

- don't need the freedom to choose the order of attributes

- have no special desire to violate namespace-well-formedness

and so on.

Those guys will not miss anything if the API they use to produce the XML produces a fast infoset document instead.

This is why I said that the infoset is important.  The infoset captures all the information content (in an XML document) that many (most?) people care about.  

Alessandro

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: The Rising Sun: How XML Binary Restored the Fortunes of Innovators
    • From: Rick Marshall <rjm@z...>

• Prev by Date: Re: Open source request....
• Next by Date: Make XML::XPath bypass DTD?
• Previous by thread: Re: The Rising Sun: How XML Binary Restored the Fortunes of Innovators
• Next by thread: Re: The Rising Sun: How XML Binary Restored the Fortunes of Innovators
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread