Re: atoms, molecules

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 08:25 PM 4/17/01 -0400, Steve Rosenberry wrote:
>Noah's main justification against the proposal came down to this:
>
>===
>
>"The XML Recommendation itself is very clear that [1]: "Terseness in XML
>markup is of minimal importance."  While individual cases require
>judgment, it seems a mistake in general to try and use schemas to undo
>this stylistic decision. ...
>
>[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-origin-goals"

Uh, okay, so why not require everyone to use markup like:
<date><year>1970</year><month>11</month><day>25</day></date>

>I choose these other XML goals as justification for datatypes as regular
>expression atoms:
>
>   2. XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
>   6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
>   9. XML documents shall be easy to create.
>
>Goals 6 and 9 are in direct competition with goal 10 which Noah
>referenced.  As for goal 2, the reason I am specifically looking at XML
>as a solution is that I can define my own application specific language
>that comes with a strong already written parser.  By adding parser
>constructs that simplify and clarify my specific language, my users gain
>more benefits from goals 6 and 9.

Yep.  And by making it possible to access that information in multiple 
environments, you preserve a lot of the interoperability that XML 
promises.  Working with atoms lets us avoid a lot of not-very-portable 
application code.

>On the other hand and in the interest of fairness, all the features that
>everyone in the XML community keeps adding on top of the original XML
>spec (Schema, SOAP, etc...) contradicts another of the original XML
>goals:
>
>   5. The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the
>      absolute minimum, ideally zero.
>
>I guess that's why we keep creating new names for all these other
>features...

Heh.  I'm afraid I agree, and I've always found XML 1.0 itself to have too 
many options.


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books