xml-dev - RE: XSet, an XML Property Set, was: re: Why the Infoset?

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 11:00 AM 8/2/00 -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>2. "Groves and property sets are overbuilt."  Possibly 
>but I don't have a good feel for this.  It seems to me 
>the same thing said about SGML lead to HTML and XML.  
>Half a decade later some slowly realize that HTML 
>was too underbuilt and XML is slowly reacquiring most 
>of the concepts of SGML.  My intuition is that simple 
>requirements everyone can understand tend to be less 
>robust than the problems a few can.  It sounds elitist but 
>the reality is one of experience over expectation.

In some ways I'm deeply sympathetic to groves, but in other ways I'm
definitely not.  It seems wonderful to me to define a model that can be
applied to pretty much any data source, including legacy data sources that
don't look at all like XML.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that project does anything good for XML
itself, which is pretty much my criterion for what is appropriate to
XML-oriented specs.  Similarly, URIs are wonderful things, but I don't
think their larger capabilities - beyond absolute URLs used to _locate_
things - have been good for XML.

I suspect that using groves to define an Infoset for XML would be great for
groves, but I'm not sure it would do anything good for XML.  

If that means reinventing the wheel periodically, well, there seem to be a
lot of wheels in need of periodic reinvention...

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books