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At the risk of, but not intending to, starting a minor war,
I'll mention Architectural Forms relative to this discussion.
Regarding the equivalence of the argyle socks, in attributes
versus elements, I would think that this is application specific.
- Mitch
Owen Walcher wrote:
>>Now we have had five years of XML, we can see that there are
>>three main communities who are not well-served by the current
>>well-formed/valid distinction in XML: at the dumb end of town
>>are the SOAP people who don't need entities or a DOCTYPE declaration;
>>at the middle of town we have the XHTML people who do need
>>entities but don't need validation (or who will be switching to some
>>other XML schema language such as ISO DSDL instead of DTDs);
>>and at the grand end of town, the Schema and Query people wish
>>DTDs could go away faster.
>
>
> At the risk of being at the "dumb" end of the XML curve, I am looking to
> come up with a set of "codd-like" rules that lets me used well-formed XML in
> malleable/adaptive applications without the need for a DTD or Schema. Sure,
> XSLT lets me convert to whatever I like, assuming I know what is coming
> a-priori. But what if I don't know what is coming in, and I want to have a
> structure that helps me guess (like the implied context of a hierarchy)?
>
> I would like to be able to use these rules for both data and documents.
> This is why the attribute vs. element thing is what got me started.
> whereas:
>
> <sock pattern="Argyle"/> is the same as
> <sock><pattern>Argyle</pattern></sock> from an XML point of view,
>
> <sock pattern="Argyle">
> <size>large</size>
> </sock> vs.
>
> <sock>
> <pattern>Argyle</pattern>
> <size>Large</size>
> </sock>
>
> Have two completely different semantics, in that the attribute
> pattern="Argyle" (in my opinion) should not be used because it does not
> further specify the size of the sock. Certainly <FONT color='red'/> can be
> interpreted as a presentation attribute, which might safely be ignored for
> non-presentation uses, but can <Address country="us" /> be so ignored (since
> this country attribute presumably helps the machine determine the follow-on
> structure as a USA address, vs. a Germany address, which would have
> completely different structure)?
>
> Many are using XML as a transport, and then shredding/CLOBing back into
> their rigid RDBMS structures (which is why XSD seems so desired by the
> "higher end XML gods"), but some of us are trying to push the art, and use
> things like Meta Object Protocols and Reflection to be able to handle TRULY
> heterogeneous and FULLY extensible XML documents.
>
> Is anyone else working along these lines to move programming from the
> cottage industry it now is into the current century?
>
> BTW: I am hoping this to be my doctoral dissertation subject, so please
> shred away!
>
> Owen "dumb, but wanting to be enlightened" Walcher
>
>
>
>
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