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Re: XML Redux

• From: Stephen Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>
• To: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
• Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:37:18 +0000

How about calling it JAXON :-)
----
Stephen D Green



On 15 February 2011 11:10, Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:
> On 14/02/2011 18:03, Liam R E Quin wrote:
>>
>> I spent some time this weekend wondering how minimal one could make XML
>> and still have something useful. Then, like almost everyone else,
>> speculated on some random changes.
>>
>> http://www.barefootliam.org/xml/20110212-xml-redux
>>
>> (comments there are moderated to prevent spam, but should show up
>> eventually)
>>
>> Liam
>>
>>
> I'm inclined to be much more radical. There's no benefit in making
> incremental improvements that cause a lot of disruption; the world will
> stick with XML as it is today unless something radically better comes along.
> For some applications where XML has been exploited over the last ten years,
> JSON is radically better; for other applications, it's hopeless. Let's
> rethink from the ground up, learning from what has gone before in other
> traditions as well as our own.
>
> Angle brackets aren't a good way to handle structured data. It's not just
> the end tags that are redundant; there's usually no need to have separate
> names for a collection and its members, and there's no need to name each
> member of a homogeneous collection. They were invented for textual markup;
> let's stop trying to use them for other purposes.
>
> What data structures do we need? Basically those in JSON, plus structured
> text.
>
> * Maps (key - value pairs)
>
> * Sequences of values
>
> * Strings, numbers, booleans
>
> * Text elements
>
> For syntax, extend JSON with one additional kind of value - the text element
> - which looks like an XML element today, except that the attributes are
> replaced by a property of an element called its metadata which may be any of
> the above kind of values - most often a map, but not restricted.
>
> So we might have
>
> {  authors: [
>      {name: "Michael Kay", affiliation: "Saxonica"},
>      {name: "Liam Quin", affiliation: "W3C"}
>   ]
>   abstract: <para { style : "bold" }>Here be some dragons</para>
>   content: <section { numbers : [1,1,2] }><para>...</para></section>
> }
>
> This uses the tagging syntax where it was designed to be used, for textual
> markup; it uses notations designed for structured data when we want to hold
> structured data; and it gives full composability between the two - including
> of course elements within the metadata of another element.
>
> Michael Kay
> Saxonica
>
>
>
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• References:
  • XML Redux
    • From: Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>
  • Re: XML Redux
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>