Re: [xml-dev] Does the XML syntax have an underlying data model?

["Norman Gray" <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>]

Lauren and Henry, hello.

On 17 Apr 2016, at 19:28, Lauren Wood wrote:

> Some people on the XML WG did not want to define a data model. It
> wasn't only a matter of not having the time. It's the 'bits on the
> wire' philosophy
> (https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/199x/1999/08/18/BitsOnTheWire is
> an example).
...in response to Henry writing

> http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/XML_MetaArchitecture.html
>
> (TL;DR: "Angle brackets and equal signs are just an Infoset’s way of
> perpetuating itself")
These two positions are _highly_ compatible.  A tree of Infoset nodes 
_is_ the document (from one point of view), but if you want to transport 
it somewhere else, you need a wire protocol (as Tim Bray stresses, in my 
reading of the blog post), so you invent XML and document it very 
carefully, and talk about it in enough detail that many people mistake 
the XML serialisation for the document.

Of course, historically this happened in the opposite direction (and I 
appreciate this may be a quixotic point of view), but in my head that is 
the natural and productive sequence.

A tree-centred approach is why I think [1] is a better approach to 
DigSig than one based on a canonical serialisation.

All the best,

Norman


[1] http://text.nxg.me.uk/2015/b65m

(when do I get to say 'HyTime' again? Please?)

--
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK