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

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote -

> > Why have any markup at all?  Just use asn.1 and PER encoding, for example.
> > This will be compact and unambiguous (we hope, at any rate!).
> > Make the asn.1 schema available over the web, use it to compile your data
> > structures, and you have Matthew's world taken to its ultimate.
> >  Maybe we can even do compile the structures dynamically.
>
> You can. The problem is it doesn't tell you how to interpret them
> beyond being able to parse the data to create them. Ooops.
>
Exactly.  But the again, the data-oriented people are saying that you still
won't how to interpret the data without a schema, even with markup in the data
document.  If that is so, it's not a strong case for using markup.

I really posed the question because I suspect that markup is often used for
good reasons by reasons beyond the surface explanations usually given ( valid
thought they may be).  I hoped to bring some of these things out of hiding.

> That's the point of XSL Beans... you not only send the data, but also
> the definition for the interpreter (ie. use XSL to instantiate an
> interpreter).
>

Lovely.

Cheers,

Tom P