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

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

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?

What do you mean by "floating point number"? :-))

Silly question but it underlies something cool about XML Schema datatyping
in that it is _possible_ to define a datatype in terms of a regular
expression ... so the <value>45.67</value> is plain and simple text ... XML
is just text. The fact that "45.67" matches a regexp labelled
"floating-point" perhaps means that the call:

  float createIEEEwhateverFromString("45.67")

will return something useful. But the value is plain and simple text. I
think that its very important that datatypes can be defined in terms of a
text pattern rather than binary goo -- it allows me to tolerate the
existence of terms like "unsigned short integer" in an XML spec.

-Jonathan