The memories of those who participated in the development at the time is more reliable than your retro-fitted interpretations of texts. There are multiple people on this list who were there and are not so senile that they are unreliable.
When we made Xml, it was in full knowledge that there was at least four ways to process the xml: as text [a la perl], as event streams [a la omnimark], as functions on graphs of nodes [a la dsssl], and as objects [a la most new languages in the 90s]. (And i believe some involved also had in mind the method of shredding into databases.)
Xml was designed for text, events, nodes, objects: all of the conventional processing methods of the time. But nodes were not special, nor foremost, to my memory. The issue was having a simple top-down parser, not a data model or api.
But i think you are just trolling.
Rick Jelliffe
On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 3:21 AM, John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 11:45 AM, David Sheets <kosmo.zb@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Please direct me to the relevant source that refutes that XML was
>> "designed for nodes".
Hi John,
This is quite far off-topic.
> Asking for a source to demonstrate a pure negative is not reasonable.
I was not asking for a demonstration of a negative i.e. "Prove that
XML was not designed for nodes". I was asking for *any* evidence that
the claim did not hold. Once again, I made this claim in response to a
series of absurd claims by Uche (which still go unaddressed) and I
really have no interest in defending it. Simon did a fine job of
supplying some evidence that Uche could have supplied to show that my
statement was overbroad. I am happy making (and defending) the claim
"XML was designed for elements".
> If I claimed that one of the purposes of the American Revolution was to make
> Alexander Hamilton the king of America in the place of George III, could you
> point me to a source that refutes that claim? I don't think so. And yet
> the claim is absurd.
I could easily refute the claim that it was *the* purpose just as
Simon easily refuted the claim that "XML was designed for nodes".
I am really quite surprised that a group of otherwise logical people
have such a hard time understanding that the statements "XML was
designed for nodes" and "XML was designed for elements" have nearly
zero distinction with respect to the question of "Can element omission
be used to model optional elements?"
If you'll excuse me, I will now return to basking in the
unsubstantiated disrespect and condescension that seems to be
prevalent in this niche community.
David
> --
> GMail doesn't have rotating .sigs, but you can see mine at
> http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/signatures
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