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At 7:44 PM -0500 3/4/02, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> I would be tempted to tease and ask what is an XML document (would
>the TAG ever find the answer ;-) . I also note that in use case like
>the Jabber protocol, you never end-up with a "fully composed document"
>it only exists once the processing is finished and that it had become
>useless.
Is this really a problem? According to the XML spec "A data object is
an XML document if it is well-formed, as defined in this
specification." That does leave the question of what a data object
is, but I think a reasonable answer is "a sequence of bytes or a
sequence of Unicode characters". Pretty clearly the spec does not
intend that a data object be a traditional OOP object of some kind.
I do wish the spec made that last point explicit, but I do think it
won't get anybody into trouble and might indeed pull a few developers
people out of the quicksand they've mired themselves in by believing
things like objects can be XML documents instead of representation of
an XML document. (To cite a classic OOP example, nobody believes a
Car object is a car. Why do developers insist on claiming Document
objects are documents?)
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
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