[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
"W. E. Perry" wrote:
>
> james anderson wrote:
>
> > Bill de hÓra wrote:
> > > Which 'the abstract data model' would that be?
> >
> > the one in terms of which operations in your processing-environment-of-choice are
> > expressed.
>
> Petitio principii, I fear.
perhaps, but not in the sense which i suspect you intend.
> 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.
perhaps because they presume models (data and processing) which engender
molithic applications.
> 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. Grasping
> for such abstractions is the fundamental misconception (some days I am tempted to
> think 'obstinance') which regularly diverts conversations in the XML community from
> XML to not-XML.
yes, it would be possible to process xml with a pencil and a large pad of paper.
please do be more specific. i do, in fact, regret that, over the years no user
has indicated that the model was limiting. could be a social thing.
> (Parenthetically, I am *very* sorry that Tim Bray might have absented
> himself from this present thread, addressing as it does core issues raised by our
> syntactically-defined standard. Given their fundamental nature, raising those
> questions is never out of order, nor is stare decesis in the name of the Namespaces
> Rec an adequate disposal of them.)
i did not intend that there should have been anything in my notes to imply
some imperative for the encoding rules specified in namespaces in xml.
...
|
