xml-dev - Re: Why the Infoset?

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

XML is a serialization of a logical document structure defined by the XML
Infoset. The Infoset uses the DOM as an API. If an XML document is defined
by the character stream, the document is also defined by the SAX event
stream (which may result from parsing the XML document, but also may result
from another event source).

In order to map MIME onto XML, I've used XMTP
(http://www.openhealth.org/documents/xmtp.htm). At first it may appear that
this is useful only for *actually* converting MIME text streams into XML
text streams. Not so. Using the XML Infoset, XMTP also defines the
generation of a series of SAX events as the result of parsing a MIME
document, or a DOM interface that results from parsing a MIME document. In
this case one might generate an (X)HTML page from an e-mail message using
XSLT ***without actually ever generating an intermediate XML stream***

Similarly one can interpret a directory structure as an XML Infoset (the XML
uberdocument approach).

Jonathan Borden
http://www.openhealth.org

----- Original Message -----
From: Paul W. Abrahams <abrahams@valinet.com>
To: XMLDev list <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2000 2:04 PM
Subject: Why the Infoset?


> What is the purpose of the XML Infoset?  Is it mainly
> intended to enlighten implementors about what the abstract
> structure of an XML document is, or does it have some other
> less obvious uses?   Are there other XML specs that refer to
> it in normative contexts, i.e., that would be ill-defined
> without the Infoset?   The XPath spec refers to it in a
> non-normative context but that doesn't count.
>
> Paul Abrahams