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Re: atoms, molecules
- From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- To: ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson)
- Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 09:07:53 -0400
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