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[<JT>] Names and how they are woven into the story is important. When I re-read this part of the XML Rec I still find it a rather daunting explanation for something so elegant and simple as XML. As Per Version 5 of the XML Rec: " Each XML document has both a logical and a physical structure. Physically, the document is composed of units called entities. An entity may refer to other entities to cause their inclusion in the document. A document begins in a "root" or document entity. Logically, the document is composed of declarations, elements, comments, character references, and processing instructions, all of which are indicated in the document by explicit markup. The logical and physical structures MUST nest properly, as described in 4.3.2 Well-Formed Parsed Entities." After reading this I still didn't have a clue. To me Xml is physical - for example a file/buffer or stream of markup - mostly what would be called the physical layout in a database system. Or a group of files that have some "inclusion" relationship to each other - to me that is physical. InfoSet or DOM is more the "logical" level, and perhaps that is what is being said - but in the revisit leave that to InfoSet. Perhaps it is not so much the use of the word Entity but the way it is defined. As well, the above paragraph does not talk about Entity definitions and Entity usages - perhaps use of the definition/declaration language would help. Comments below: -----Original Message----- From: rjelliffe@allette.com.au [mailto:rjelliffe@allette.com.au] Sent: Monday, August 24, 2009 9:11 PM To: 'XML Developers List' Subject: Re: Xml Revisited > I kept wondering how something so simple could use such convoluted terms. > An entity to me was something in Entity Relationship modeling. A file was > something you included. A compiland (Pascal) was something you imported - > or a package in Java. What is your point: there should only ever be one name for anything, and it should be the same name that you use? I know COBOL people who get upset that SGML uses "attribute" and "element" so incorrectly. Actually, maybe you do have a point: maybe standards should have an explicit note about terms that have multiple uses in the wild (ISO standards all have a terms and definitions section for this purpose.) That entities are not what we would expect is not a compelling reason for not having them, is it? (Indeed, the failure of XInclude may show that the entity mechanism was in fact pretty practical and could be usefully revived.) [<JT>] I live in a content world where XInclude is very alive (DocBook) and "transclusion" mechanisms like content references in DITA are very much alive. In both these cases Entities were not chosen. If you want to look at SOAP attachments Entities were not used... > Also the name Extensible Markup Language is a misnomer. XML is not a > language but a general meta grammar for creating and number of > "languages". Well, it certainly is a language in CS terms, because a formal language is just syntactic, and XML certainly is a grammar. Cheers Rick _______________________________________________________________________ XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS to support XML implementation and development. To minimize spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@lists.xml.org subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@lists.xml.org List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php
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