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At 03:32 PM 6/11/2002 -0600, Aaron Skonnard wrote:
> > Simon St.Laurent:
> > It provides it through a very limited set of transformations
> > from lexical to value which have their own peculiarities, and
> > blesses the value space almost exclusively.
>
>Can you expand on this?
Sure. W3C XML Schema Datatypes is far more interested in the value space
than the lexical space throughout. Apart from xs:string, pretty much every
aspect of that specification is about ensuring that a particular value
space meets particular criteria. It does offer the convenience of patterns
for constraining the lexical (and thereby the value) space, and offers a
few shreds of whitespace options, but I read that spec as describing a very
narrow universe of values, not the wide universe of lexical possibilities
that came with XML 1.0.
This is all well and good if all you care about is serializing information
which already lives in a type system with constraints similar to those of
W3C XML Schema, but it's a pretty complete disaster if you have any
interest in supporting a wider range of lexical possibilities. From the
effective privileging of the value space to the complete inability to
define new primitive types or additional facets, there's nothing in W3C XML
Schema that seems interested in the lexical potential XML 1.0 has to offer.
Heck, there are times I wonder if W3C XML Schema is a terrified response to
the wide-open potential of XML 1.0, a grotesque effort to close the
Pandora's box of lexical expression that markup permits and indeed
encourages - but maybe that's putting it a bit too strongly.
> > This is inadequate for those of us who care about lexical
> > flexibility, and your supposed agreement is effectively strong
> > disagreement.
>
>Man, you're so literal ;-) I thought we actually agreed on
>something this time.
Nope. Not likely on this subject given what I know of your perspective on
XML and XML processing.
Literalness is pretty crucial stuff here, and those fine distinctions are
awfully useful.
Simon St.Laurent
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue
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