[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML -- information architect, JSON -- program objects,HTML
Stephen, although I won't quibble with the overall architectural design you set out I really can't see why anyone here is pushing XML as a "data structure". For data, XML is a serialization format, mostly a way to get bit's and bytes exchanged between systems. Those other systems might in turn convert the XML into a data structure, or those systems might save XML as an opaque blob, but that's a process performed on the XML and not part of the XML itself.
I do understand the temptation to view XML as having some form of structure, and as a serialization format (and a document format) it needs to have a standardized way of being interpreted. However, one needs to resist the temptation to confuse the book with the information contained inside the book. (As a data modeler I fall into that trap on a regular basis in spite of having started with SGML when data transport wasn't even really considered.) There are portions of the XML tool set that build elements and nodes and trees and what have you, but those are internal to the applications handling the XML. The DOM and Infoset models do nothing to relieve the confusion -- they probably give life to it -- but I think if you examine them carefully you will see that they claim, at best, to represent an interpretation of XML and are not in and of themselves XML.
Yes, it's a thin semantic line that I'm drawing here, but it's an important one; as others have pointed out here, it is this very decoupling of XML from the way it is represented internally by the systems that handle it that makes XML so flexible.
Peter Hunsberger
On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 7:36 PM, Stephen Cameron <steve.cameron.62@gmail.com> wrote:
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