RE: What is an XML document?

[Michael Fitzgerald <mike@wyeast.net>]

John,

An XML document concretely describes abstract notions. Without concrete
representations, an abstract notion may exist but may not be useful for
practical purposes. Gertrude Stein comes to mind. I paraphrase: "An XML
document is an XML document is an XML document."

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2001 9:04 AM
To: Michael Beddow; xml-dev@xml.org
Subject: Re: What is an XML document?


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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no more / no less              || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things             || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness           \\ -- Piet Hein