xml-dev - Re: TLAs (was: SOX)

[Peter Murray-Rust <peter@ursus.demon.co.uk>]

At 11:43 06/10/98 -0400, Tyler Baker wrote:
>John Cowan wrote:
>
>> I think that to avoid massive confusion this list needs to drop
>> "SOX" immediately and adopt another name, given the appearance of a
>> W3C note called "SOX" (yet another XML schema language).
>
>How about SEX (Simple Element-Oriented XML).  At least it would get the
attention
>of the developer community and probably every cultural commentator as well
(-:

Element-Oriented XML is a pleonasm; I'm not sure what XML without elements
would look like :-). I used the term "Element-Oriented Computing" (or
Processing) as an analogy with OOP. The point is that the programming is
mapped onto the elements and for each element there is an
(objected-oriented) chunk of code. An alternative is Element-Object
mapping. I don't claim originality, but it has been  a central theme of the
way I have been programming since I started SGML about 4 years ago (with
costwish). It needs a term to describe it as I think it's different from
stylesheet-based programming (DSSSL gurus will probably contest this).
>
>Seriously, do we really need the S for simple?  I mean SAX is simple in
how it
>presents parsed XML data to the application, but working with it is not
quite as
>simple as it is a relatively low-level interface.

Well, *I* can use SAX and that sets an upper limit on complexity :-). More
seriously I think it will be extremely important in this discussion to keep
things as simple as possible. I certainly don't understand everything that
has been written on S*X in the last week or so; this is a useful touchstone
for an upper limit.

>
>Another question is do we really need an anacronymn.  Programmers have this
>tendency to describe everything in terms of anacronyms, many of which
don't make
>sense as they simply try and satisfy the requirement that an anacronymn be
able
>to be pronounced in speech.
>
>Hey I am at a loss of words at the moment for a good name of what was
tentatively
>called SOX so maybe we should have a contest for the best name here and
vote on
>it.

I agree (thanks to MurrayM for his mail). It is useful to have a handle for
this concept. Acronyms (sic) are useful. By analogy with XSchema, I'll kick
off with XObject (XML-Objects). I bet it's not novel by now.

	P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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