Re: [xml-dev] Happy Birthday, XML!

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

On 11 Feb 2018, at 14:25, Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net> wrote:

Michael,

If not an alternative syntax, what about a more dynamic reading of XML syntax?

Yes, XML lacks complex objects (https://mark.js.org/) as attribute values but nothing prevents us from inserting such objects into an XML event stream.

The next step in the pipeline must support such objects but that burden is on the individual pipeline and not the markup community as a whole. Should that prove to be popular, no doubt support will evolve for that as a common extension to XML processing.

Hope you are having a great weekend!

Patrick

That's essentially what we did with FtanML: no difference between what can go in elements and attributes, and the content of an element is (in the data model) just another attribute with a magic name.

But a change to the data model is much more disruptive than a change to the concrete syntax.

Michael Kay

Saxonica