Re: Syntax Sugar and XML information models

[Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>]

From: John Aldridge <john.aldridge@informatix.co.uk>

>At 21:13 28/03/2001 -0500, Michael Champion wrote:
>>So, does ANYBODY care about round-tripping a) the specific quote
characters
>>around attribute values, b) the order of attributes; c) character entity
>>references for characters that are in the specified character set d) the
two
>>diferent syntaxes for empty elements, .... ?
>
>Yes, but only sometimes.  I _do_ mind if editors unpredictably change these
>things, because I'm going to store XML data in RCS, and expect rcsdiff,
>rcsmerge & the like to do sensible things.

But that means you are *not* interested in the information set of the
document, but the actual text of the document's entities. That is a fine
thing.  Let there be element-based (infoset) editors and entity-based
(tag-aware) editors.

Speaking of editors, what features do people think the current generation of
XML editors is missing?

Does this discussion reflect, perhaps, that while people are happy with the
(core) infoset as being the thing that is used for transformations into
other formats or navigation, they expect editing that looks like it is
acting in-place to actually _be_ in-place, so that there are no other
changes?

Cheers,
Rick Jelliffe
Topologi