Re: What is an XML document?

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Michael Beddow wrote:

> er, where's the other voice in this rather interesting dialogue?
> 
> I'm getting only John, not Danny.

Sorry, my error.  I mistakenly added xml-dev to a posting
to a different mailing list.

But a precis of the debate is that Dan thinks "XML document" to be
a purely abstract notion defined by a formal rule.  Whereas I think
it just means "document which is in well-formed XML", where
"document" is a concrete notion referring to something that has
physical existence.

This has practical consequences, because I say an XML document doesn't
exist unless every external entity referred to from the document
entity exists.  Dan says that "exist" is not a useful notion for
XML documents, any more than it is for integers.
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