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On Sat, 2002-03-02 at 11:23, Mike Champion wrote:
> There *does* seem to be a trend toward defining alternate non-XML syntaxes
> for such things; for example, the XQuery people seem to have decided that
> their initial requirement for an XML version of the query syntax doesn't
> meet a strong real-world need, and the RELAX-NG people have defined an
> alternate typist-friendly syntax that directly maps onto the normative
> XML syntax.
I love to see that kind of stuff - RELAX NG seems to be an especially
friendly approach. That's pretty different from using Java (or C#, or
VB, or whatever) to directly do the work. I don't mind using Java to
write my processors, but I don't want to limit the processes I'm
defining to Java.
> I'm sure this is controversial, but a case could be made that
> "XML" is more than the angle bracket syntax; the InfoSet and the DOM
> can be thought of as "XML" and they operate on the output of a parser
> and don't care about the syntax that the parser understands.
That was really controversial a few years ago, but I'm not sure most
people worry about the distinction so much any more.
I've been discussing XML syntax as a canonical form of markup, one of
many lexical conventions for describing information - and the one with
the most tools available for processing. I'd love to see more parsers
for non-XML formats that can interoperate (via SAX, DOM, Infoset,
whatever) with XML, and I think they're coming.
In a lot of ways that kind of processing looks more interesting than XML
work itself. (I'm hoping the groves folks will enjoy it, though I think
it's worked out a little differently than they've hoped.)
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com
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