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On Tuesday 15 January 2002 08:26 am, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> At 11:15 PM -0500 1/14/02, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
> >What happens if I don't
> > a) read english
>
> 1. Ask a colleague who reads English
> 2. Hire somebody to translate it into the language of choice
> 3. Get a dictionary
Let's change it to Maori then. Do you have 1) or 2)? How much would 2)
cost?
> > b) know the schema
>
> I read the English.
or the Maori apparently.
The point is that XML can be as opaque as anything else, and that
tags, in and of themselves, say little about overall semantics, and
hardly anything about structure beyond encoding an attributed tree.
An attributed tree is admittedly a useful data structure, but not
without some means for interpreting it.... and in that regard, XML is
no better, and perhaps somewhat worse than CSV... because the signal
to noise ratio is higher *if* the names are not intuitive to the
interpreting entity.
There *are* benefits to using XML well, and defining "largely
interoperable" tag vocabularies (HTML). Those benefits spring not from
XML, but rather, careful use thereof.
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