Re: Personal reply to Edd Dumbill's XML Hack Article wrt W3C XML Schema

["W. E. Perry" <wperry@fiduciary.com>]

Matthew Gertner wrote:

> Let me get this straight. I have the following document:
>
> <foo>
>         <value>45.67</value>
> </foo>
>
> What you are saying is that someone might want to treat "value" directly as
> something other than a floating point number? I can easily see how this
> element could be transformed into a boolean (e.g. greater than 30) for
> display, or into an integer (e.g. through truncation) for some other
> processing. But surely the original value in the original document is always
> a real number, right? If not, I'd appreciate a more concrete example. I'm
> not sure whether I get it.

The 'original value in the original document' is the character string
'<value>45.67</value>'; after parsing it is the text '45.67'. There is no real
number there. If some recipient of that document requires a real number of this
form in a field which--through mechanisms he is responsible for and which may
not be known to the sender--he can identify with this <value> element, and if he
has (which we assume) the processing capability to instantiate what arrives as a
character string in the XML document into the internal representation of a real
number which his processing software requires, then it is incumbent on that
recipient to do just that as part of the processing which he is specifically
responsible for.

Respectfully,

Walter Perry