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On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 00:49:31 +0000, Bill de hÓra <bill@dehora.net> wrote:
> Sure thing. But we'd be all well served not muddying XML with XML
> Infosets.
For better or worse XPath/XSLT and DOM dumped a lot of mud into the water
very shortly after the XML 1.0 syntax spec came out. I really don't think
there's any point in longing for the pristine waters of pure XML, unless of
course you want to get rid of XPath, XSLT, DOM ... along with XSDL, SOAP,
XQuery, and a bunch of other stuff that many people here WOULD like to get
rid of :-)
I'm sure there's a few thousand people out there who would be happy users
of pure syntax XML tools such as SAX, and maybe the databinding specs could
be tweaked to support DTDs and RELAX NG rather than XSDL, and that might
make the syntax a bit more accessible to ordinary programmers. But it
seems to me that if you want to toss out all the flavors of Infosets, the
XML party is pretty much over for the vast majority of users.
In other words, it's not going to happen, so what's the point of wishing it
would? I wish people would just acknowledge that the XML syntax and
Infoset(s) were joined at birth (every well-formed XML document can be
parsed into a tree). Then maybe we could do what has to be done to make the
actual Infoset spec more useful (e.g., by making the language less awkward,
such as "element" rather than "element information item" [gag]), and making
it as formally rigorous as the syntax spec (somebody said that this could
be done with ASN.1, but I don't know that). My wish sounds about as
futile as Bill's wish for pristine waters, I fear.
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