Agreed.
Coming back to the request from Rick ("show me in the massive
XML standard (without resorting to any other layer or standard)
how to say that some specific string (i.e an attribute value or
element contents) containing digits is a number, say a decimal
number"), my conclusion is: Production Rule 26 together with
the Quotations from the Standard is an Example of "how to
say that some specific string containing digits is a number".
It tells us that this particular String is a version number.
However, I admit that this seems to be the only example where the
XML standard assigns the semantics of a number to a string. And i
know, it's a bit of a cheat, because it's a string inside the XML
Declaration.
Greetings, Frank
There are statements elsewhere about the semantics:
[Definition: XML documents should begin with an XML declaration which specifies the version of XML being used.]
And this provides a context within which readers are likely to understand what "version number" means. Without this context, it could easily be the version of the vocabulary, or the version of the instance document.
Michael KaySaxonica
On 29 Jan 2022, at 10:14, Frank Steimke <f-steimke@berger-und-steimke.de> wrote:
It is true that the quoted sentence presupposes a basic understanding on the part of the reader of what is meant by "version number". But without this basic understanding the whole specification would have no meaning at all.
After all, the sentence is normative. For what reason does the XML specification make statements about permissible values of the attribute if it is completely unclear what its semantic should be?
Greetings,
Frank
Am 29.01.22 um 10:53 schrieb Michael Kay:
On 29 Jan 2022, at 09:37, Frank Steimke <f-steimke@berger-und-steimke.de> wrote:
Section 2.8 Prolog and Document Type Declaration Production Rule 26 VersionNum together with the following note, which explains the semantic of VersionNum as a decimal Number:
"Even though the VersionNum production matches any version number of the form '1.x', XML 1.0 documents SHOULD NOT specify a version number other than '1.0'."
Greetings,
Frank
That doesn't say anything about the semantics of the version number, it just gives some constraints on its value. It doesn't say what information it conveys: for all this sentence says, VersionNum tells you the number of phone calls made on an average day by the document author.
Michael KaySaxonica