[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
bill.dehora@propylon.com (Bill de hÓra) writes:
>Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>>
>> Sowa claims the essence of XML is syntax:
>>
>> "The reason why logic is
>> better than XML is that logic has semantics. XML by itself only
>> gives you syntax."
>
>Which for a syntactic form is exactly what you want. You don't want
>syntax+some-rules-for-my-really-important-problem. Not baked in
>anyway. Replace 'logic' with 'a program' in Sowa's claim, and see
>how it reads then.
That gets nicely to the heart of things from my perspective.
We've talked for years about the value of separating content from
presentation in XML. On the data side, that seem to map easily to
separating information from processing.
The fact that XML doesn't specify processing (and the very existence of
processing instructions seems to emphasize that for the rest of XML)
strikes me as its greatest virtue, not as a vice.
To put that another way, we could rephrase Wadler and Simeon's claim
from:
> From the external representation one should be able to derive the
> corresponding internal representation.
to:
> From the external representation one should be able to derive
> one's own internal representation as appropriate to the problems
> being solved at the time.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org
|
