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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@metalab.unc.edu]
> Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2005 08:35
> To: Alessandro Triglia
> Cc: 'Bullard, Claude L (Len)'; 'xml-dev'
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] The Rising Sun: How XML Binary
> Restored the Fortune s of Innovators
>
>
> Alessandro Triglia wrote:
>
> >
> > I am not asserting that all producers of XML fit the above
> description, but
> > I like thinking that a lot of them do. Otherwise, it
> would be hard to
> > understand the significance of the XML infoset, the
> significance of SAX, the
> > significance of XML Schema, etc. The XML infoset is
> important, isn't it?
>
> No, I don't think it is. Outside of the small community of
> spec writers
> and some implementers, it's hard to think of anybody who really cares
> about or even understands the XML infoset. Developers care about the
> data models exposed by DOM, SAX, XPath, etc.
However, I still believe that there are many **producers** of XML who, in fact, care only
about the "infoset" portion of the XML they produce. In other words, they:
- don't need the ability to use general entity references
- don't need the freedom to choose the nature and amount of whitespace
inside tags
- don't need the freedom to choose between a starttag/endtag pair or an
empty element tag
- don't need the freedom to choose between apostrophe and quote for
attributes
- don't need the freedom to choose the order of attributes
- have no special desire to violate namespace-well-formedness
and so on.
Those guys will not miss anything if the API they use to produce the XML produces a fast infoset document instead.
This is why I said that the infoset is important. The infoset captures all the information content (in an XML document) that many (most?) people care about.
Alessandro
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