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Re: atoms, molecules



At 11:09 AM 4/18/01 +0100, Henry S. Thompson wrote:
>Strong disagreement (speaking personally).  We have a way in XML to
>express compound objects -- it's called elements-and-attributes.  The
>mistake, in my opinion, was giving in to the SQL people and having
>_any_ kind of date or time as simple types -- they should _all_ have
>gone in to the type library as complex types.

Philosophically, I can't disagree with your overall opinion.

Elements-and-attributes are deeply useful markers of information atoms.

Unfortunately, we're stuck with a lot of not-so-simple simple types, and 
there's no obvious (or necessarily good) way to make the SQL people and 
their friends leave the party.

As a result, I'm trying to take my document-centric ways (and my distant 
memories of regular expressions) and find a cleaner way of dealing with 
some of these complexified types.


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