Re: atoms, molecules

["Rzepa, Henry" <h.rzepa@ic.ac.uk>]

The preceeding discussion of course attracted my attention as
a chemist!

Its bad enough having to explain the difference in my community
between chemical elements and XML elements, without the prospect
of having to do so for molecules and atoms (:-)  I suppose
we should consider ourselves lucky that xlink was never called
<bond> (is there a proposal to use the term?)
Add <electron> and  <reaction>  and you would have most of the CML DTD,
or should I say schema.

I appreciate that the namespaces are different,   but still  I can
see difficulties ahead with my molecular and atomic
(leaving aside bonded) colleagues!

>Every time I've read XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes, I've been unhappy with
>the wide variety of compound types that are considered 'primitives' by the
>specification.  Leaving aside the issue of primitive types that could be
>derived from other types, we've still got compounds like:
>...


>It would also open up the prospect of treating other compounds - like the
>CSS style attribute, some of the path information in SVG, and various other
>places where the principle of one chunk, one string has been violated - as
>a set of atoms which could themselves be validated and/or transformed
>and/or typed.
>
>This leads to another kinds of post-processing infoset, where the atoms are
>available as an ordered set of child nodes, but it seems like a promising road.
-- 

Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0870) 132-3747 (eFax)
Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7  2AY, UK. 
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/