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RE: Names As Types

• To: 'Michael Champion' <michaelc.champion@g...>
• Subject: RE: Names As Types
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 13:56:57 -0500
• Cc: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>

But the Turtles became The Mothers of Invention.

The point may be to recognize how names are used 
in practice.  Nothing in XML should change because 
it works best when it is blithely unaware of semantics. 
OTOH, we can't be so maybe recognizing cases where a 
name names a type vs name names an instance of a 
type can help us either clarify the practices or 
invent better support for them.

Abstractly, nodes is nodes and properties is properties, 
and we understand it, but it seems to confuse people 
who can't resist seeing element types as class 
declarations minus the methods.  That of course sends 
the entity/attribute camp members up the tree, and 
so much for kumbayah.

We ask the top turtle it's name.  As long 
the top turtle remains balanced, we 
don't worry about the name of his subordinate being 
correct because we don't have to care.  Otherwise, 
we ask the top turtle to name his turtle.

class turtle IS_A turtle

An element type names a type.  If we want to know 
the type of the turtle, we should put that in the 
document returned by the namespace URI.  Why shouldn't 
that work?

len


From: Michael Champion [mailto:michaelc.champion@g...]

On 8/24/05, Bullard, Claude L (Len) <len.bullard@i...> wrote:
> Or negotiate semantics.
> 
> Oh look, yet another meta-spec. :-)

It's turtles all the way down, young man!  (c.f. 
http://members.tripod.com/TheoLarch/turtle.html among many others)

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