xml-dev - Re: Why the Infoset?

[Joe English <jenglish@flightlab.com>]

Sean McGrath <sean@digitome.com> wrote:

> At 17:29 01/08/00 +0100, Kay Michael wrote:
> >Personally, I don't have any problems identifying the need for the infoset:
> >I've seen so many people try to attach meaning to lexical distinctions that
> >should not carry meaning that I yearn for an authority I can point to when
> >telling them they're wrong.
>
> But distinctions that are irrelevant for some applications are not
> irrelevant for others.

That's precisely what the Infoset is trying to
*prevent from happening*!

> This is the nub of the problem. The infoset
> throws certain things away. In so doing, it creates problems
> for certain types of XML processing applications.

I can think of a couple such applications --
XML editors and XML-aware transcoders come to mind;
I certainly don't want an XML editor to arbitrarily
rearrange attribute specifications and normalize
whitespace in start-tags -- but that only means that
XML editors should *not* be Infoset-based applications.
What other applications do you have in mind?

On the other hand, I don't want to end up building
an XML application using Tool X (which uses abstract
data model X), only to find out that my documents
can't be processed with Tool Y, because my application
attached semantic significance to a property that is
present in data model X but absent in data model Y.


--Joe English

  jenglish@flightlab.com