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This is IMHO the fundamental misunderstanding of markup which brings us once
again to the ur-permathread of XML-DEV. In markup the GI asserts a type, or
general case, or Platonic Form, and asserts as well the connection of that type
to the instance value which it marks up. What the semantics, or 'meaning' of
that type might be requires that the marked-up instance be processed so as to
elaborate a particular meaning appropriate to that instance in the context of
that markup as handled by that process on that occasion for a particular
audience. There is no requirement that any reader of a marked-up instance
process that instance in the same way as the author of that instance might.
Indeed, the fundamental extensibility of XML lies not merely in the privilege of
an author to assert a novel GI, or to assert a GI in a novel connection to a
particular instance, but in the equal privilege of every audience to that
instance to process it in an idiosyncratic manner and thereby to elaborate from
it idiosyncratic semantics.
Respectfully,
Walter Perry
Vladimir Gapeyev wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Elliotte Harold wrote:
>
> > "XML is only semi-structured with no explicit type information." is a
> > feature, not a bug. Removing it makes the data less useful, and the format
> > fairly uninteresting. XML would not be where it is today if it featured
> > strong data typing.
>
> Why wouldn't it? In a sensibly well-designed XML-with-data-types, the
> untyped (textual, PCDATA) values would be just one of the datatypes. So,
> any document in XML-as-we-know-it would be a well-formed document in
> XML-with-datatypes. Anyone not interested in types is free to ignore
> them. (Maybe it is even still possible to define XML-with-datatypes as
> an extension of XML 1.0, maintaining backward compatibility?)
>
> VG
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