Metaphors that the XML community uses

“An XML document is a tree.”

Obviously an XML document is not a tree. I look out my window and I see a bunch of (real) trees. XML documents don’t look like those trees.

When we say that an XML document is a tree, we are using a metaphor. We are relating one thing (an XML document) to another thing (tree), as a way to help understand and describe the first thing (XML documents).

Mary Holstege wrote a paper on metaphors that we use with XML. Here is the introduction in her paper:

Computer information and software are abstractions. We comprehend them through the use of metaphors. Different metaphors lead us to understand our information and our processing of it in different ways. They lead us to focus on certain aspects of the experience over other aspects.

This paper examines some metaphors we use to talk about markup. Being mindful of what our metaphors are telling us implicitly allows us to see what we are missing.

See analyzed a bunch of XML documents – using XQuery and AWK – to identify which metaphors are used.

https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol21/html/Holstege01/BalisageVol21-Holstege01.html