The only proper semantics of a string in standalone XML data content or attribute values is its influence on rendering and collation (sorting, matching). Anything else involves handwaving, metonymy, and passing off other layers (which certainly will exist) as "XML".
Are you saying the massive XML 1.0 standard document version 5 is full of lies?!
Standalone XML provides no way to express values: no datatypes not even boolean or numbers.
And yet there thousands of words in the bare bones standard. Surely there's more to XML than this simplistic explanation you give?
I jest; og course it is! Of course it does! It tells you how certain characters mean, what it means when you during them together in certain order, what the meaning of your string is if it's wrapped in < and or with an @, what the concept of whitespace is, the concept of elements and attributes and namespaces and URI and lots of other things.
I suspect you don't mean that, right? You're referring to something outside of all the things XML actually defines, inside the wrapper and all the ontologically agreement it possesses, *there* XML don't define any meaning. I think you're kidding yourself if you think XML is this pure character based text channel that carries no meaning. Even in the concept of nested elements there is meaning. Even a root element with a cdata section has meaning before we even got the cdata.
XML provides no way to express facts: no surity level of the sources, no reliability of the sources, not even booleans.
Don't really know if anyone has made that claim, though.
And we should not be surprised if people who want a notation to directly represent values adopt JSON, which has enough delimiters and rules to represent boring values without fuss*
Are you trying to say that JSON has more rules and / or special characters than XML, or something like that? Because that would be an interesting and bold claim worth diving into. :)
Cheers,
Alex
