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W. E. Perry wrote:
>... The larger point is that after 5+ years of XML processing a
> significant number of practitioners have discovered (or reaffirmed what
they already
> knew) that XML applications are effectively monolithic from the syntactic
instance to
> the idiosyncratic output. That is the inescapable consequence of a
syntactic
> definition of XML--a hard fact which has been lost on, or ignored by,
ancillary
> specifications that insist on introducing specious abstractions between
the
> syntactically-conformant instance and some processing of it appropriate to
a desired
> specific outcome. To induce from the nature of particular processing some
abstract
> data model which appropriately describes an XML input instance as handled
by that
> process may be a useful exercise in designing or refining the
implementation of that
> process, but it is at best otiose to the XML instance itself, or indeed to
other
> processing which might usefully manipulate that instance for other
purposes.
Your writing is illustrative of what might be described as a predeliction
among programmers for describing processes (that's what an algorithm
describes -- a process).
The problem with this analysis is that the world isn't _only_ about
processes and processing -- there exists a declarative approach which has a
fundamental fit with XML -- which fundamentally is, or describes, a data
format (not a process description).
The ontologic approach is such a declarative approach -- for example,
nowhere in the OWL specifications is *any* writing about a "processing
model". You may consider such ontologic descriptions as specious
abstractions, but the whole point of this excercize is that much can be done
*without specifying any processing*.
We have only data and descriptions of data. When I was first discovering
XML, I recall reading the statement that XML is appropriate when the useful
life of the data is expected to be longer than the useful life of the
software that processes it. It seems to me that descriptions of data can
similarly outlive the processes that derive from these descriptions.
Jonathan
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