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On Friday 17 January 2003 03:34 pm, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> Objects have methods and objects can have circular references.
> Representing those in plain vanilla XML (i.e. no DTDs or schema) is an
> immense challenge without resorting to what some would colorfully
> describe as "gross hacks".
I don't get it.
In DOM XML markup is used to define interfaces. A little more imaginative
thought can extend that to objects, including full expression representation
to the point that I could do a bidirectional transformation between Java/C#
and an XML representation which could be compiled or interpreted just as
effectively as either of the other two (though it'd be a pain to write). I
have done something like this in the past (first in 1995/1996 or so actually,
so a bit before XML ;-))
If you talk about instantiated object graphs, the XML object reader and writer
code in JDK 1.3 shows that it's not all *that* hard to even serialize the
entire application state to XML, and to then reinstantiate it into a runtime
representation later, and I wouldn't call either the code, or the
serialization a "gross hack".
Like ConciseXML, it's meaningless to say "XML can do this, but not that" or
"XML is limited in this way". XML has nothing to do with it: it's the
applications that *use* XML that decide what it can and cannot do.
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