Re: Infoset as subset of useful

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

And John Cowan's comment explains why:

> But the Infoset is not founded on any real principle at all: its
> design is empirical.

There ought to be some organizing principle behind it.  That'd
be better support for principled improvements/objections/etc ...
What I really wanted out of infoset was such a principled data
model, not a grab-bag, to support what Tim Bray described:

> - we'd like the view of XML offered by DOM, SAX, and any other
>   API to be consistent, and the infoset ought ideally to provide
>   a foundation for maintaining consistency.

Though it doesn't.  For example, it doesn't expose declarations
for parsed entities (as exposed by DOM L1 and SAX2), for
elements, or for attributes; or <![CDATA[ ... ]]> info.

I suspect that we're probably not going to get a more useful
formal XML data model for maintaining such consistency
than what Infoset delivers.  It's better than the XML 1.0 spec
for that purpose, even with its current omissions.

- Dave