Re: [xml-dev] An inquiry into the nature of XML and how it orientsour pe

[Mukul Gandhi <gandhi.mukul@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Peter Hunsberger
<peter.hunsberger@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's always data. Not that tells us anything.

As I understand, that data means any *information* that can be
provided as input or is produced as output, to/from some computational
process. So data can be say a string "hello world" which can be
produced as output from a software program. Or say, a primitive value
10 which can for example represent a person's age and feed in as an
input to some software program. In case of XML, the data is labeled by
markup tags (say, <age>10</age>).

As I understand about XML, it is a markup language, using which we can
design either data (please see, how I describe data above), or say a
programming language (in which case, the XML markup cannot be
considered a data, but an executable program, say an XSLT program).

> Yes, one mans data, is another persons metadata , is another persons
> programming language...

I would not completely disagree to this. But contradicting a bit to
this, I'll never consider a XSLT program as data (an XSLT markup would
always be, a representation of executable program for me, conceptually
like say a java or C program).


-- 
Regards,
Mukul Gandhi