Re: [xml-dev] Caught napping!

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 10:07 PM 12/11/01 -0800, Ronald Bourret wrote:
>Out of curiousity, how many people think of XML in text terms, not model
>terms? My guess is that even proponents of well-formed XML eventually
>fall into the model camp, but I'm not sure.

As I've said before, 

1. the only normative definitions of XML, and of Namespaces,
   operate almost completely at a syntactic level.  
2. I've been in software for 20 years and I've seen lots
   of interoperable cross-platform syntax and very rarely
   an interoperable cross-platform data structure or API.

Obviously, once you're dealing with some XML inside of
a program, you think in terms of the structure.  But XML's
interoperability is strongly linked to the fact that 
its definition is syntactic.  -Tim