Re: [xml-dev] Wikipedia on XML

[Attila <atteeela@gmail.com>]

When we speak of languages here we are not referring to dialog or
things that are pronounceable.

I love Philosophy and all, but I think we should stick to the concept
of language in the computation sense (ie: regular language).

An XML document is a sentence defined by a context-free grammar
consisting of various terminals and non-terminals.
These terminals are characters and non-terminals that express the
relationship between blocks using the special <,> and / characters.

How I might put it:

XML is a set of symbols and rules that provides a standard way to
express tree-like hierarchical relationships for data.

Try to keep it simple and intuitive.  The discussion of regular
languages, grammars and such can be added later on for further
reading.

Good luck


On 8/7/09, Michael Ludwig <milu71@gmx.de> wrote:
> Alexander Johannesen schrieb am 08.08.2009 um 09:43:17 (+1000):
>> On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 08:39, Michael Ludwig<milu71@gmx.de> wrote:
>> > With the exception of "<!CDATA[" (which, just like the comment
>> > delimiters, looks suspiciously DTD-ish to me), these words can't be
>> > easily pronounced.
>>
>> :) Do you speak any of the thousands of ant languages? Or dolphinese?
>> Or mooish? Or, uh, Klingon? Heck, we don't have to go further than any
>> other programming language out there being damn hard to pronounce.
>> Just because you can't pronounce them does *not* mean it ain't a
>> language.
>
> As pointed out in my previous reply, it depends on your definition of
> language.
>
>> > But even if they could, I wouldn't think of them as words. They
>> > arrange parts of sentences, they're a structural skeleton, maybe
>> > not totally dissimilar to punctuation.
>>
>> No, I think they are carriers of semantics in the sense English words
>> differentiate between verbs, subjects, nouns, etc, it's just that the
>> syntax is different. You might say XML is a half-breed between
>> language and syntax.
>
> If you want to see the angle brackets as a vocabulary, that's fine with
> me. But I find that the look and feel is more like syntax. Both points
> of view could be argued for, maybe one with more ease than the other.
>
> One man's language, another man's syntax - or meta-language.
>
> Best,
>
> Michael Ludwig
>
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-- 
Attila
Software Developer
atteeela@gmail.com