Re: atoms, molecules

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

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.
>

Generally I agree with this sentiment that markup is the best way to
represent structured data. The problem exists with getting stuff into the
proper form -- especially when the data you are handed isn't organized in an
ideal fashion. I like to use a processing chain in such cases, and to the
extent that regular expression matching/parsing can be integrated into an
XML processing chain, we might use standard XML techniques such as XSLT
transforms to "clean up" such data into a properly structured form.

I'm not sure I need this facility in XML Schema per se, what I would really
like is an XSLT/XPath regular expression function to include variable
bindings. Recursive parsing or character data in XSLT is a fairly ugly
proposition at the moment, but something that is frequently needed in
practical applications.

-Jonathan