xml-dev - Re: Inheritance in XML [^*]

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 03:51 PM 4/23/98 +0200, james anderson wrote:
>the recommendation does, in deed, assert a semantic for xml documents.
...
>the xml recommendation defines a two relations among elements (subsumption and
>precedence), defines a (yes) language for describing these relations (the dtd
>entities), asserts three states for documents (valid, invalid, and
>unspecified), and specifies how to infer which state a document is in based
>its content.
>
>this is a "semantic"....

Reasonable people may disagree.  I believe that sequence and 
containment are purely syntactic in nature and imply no semantic
whatsoever.  Similarly I see no "semantic" in asserting that my butt
is currently placed on top of a chair, or that this chair is currently
placed in front of my computer.

>it is disheartening to read where attention is deflected from the issue by
>claiming that no semantic was intended. 

Get real.  You may choose to argue that containment and sequence 
constitute, in some philosophical framework, "semantics", but the claim
that no semantic was *intended* is unchallengeable because in point of
fact when we wrote the spec we considered that what we were describing
was syntax. -Tim


xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)