xml-dev - Re: Why the Infoset?

[Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>]

Sean McGrath wrote:
> 
> >John Cowan wrote (in reponse to W.E. Perry):
> >
> >> If you want to interpret the following XML documents differently (one
> per line):
> >>
> >>         <foo bar="baz">
> >>         <foo bar='baz'>
> >>         <foo bar='b&#97;z'>
> >>         <foo bar='b&#x61;z'>
> >>         <foo bar="b&#x61;z">
> >>
> >> by all means don't let *me* stop you.
> >
> 
> They need to be treated differently in order for the sort of fgreppery
> you talked about in:
>         http://www.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/2000/02/0225.html
> to work.

But fgreppery is not operating on the infoset per se, it is working on
the unparsed
raw text of an entity.  

That there can be several different lexical forms in XML for the same
information item
allows one to use text-based tools such as UNIX tools.   (The one I
recommend is 
always to keep markup and data for titles and searchable strings on a
single line, so that greps will work.)  

The infoset lets people know what information will be in the parsed XML,
regardless of 
which lexical form was used. 

Rick Jelliffe