On Friday 01 February 2002 07:18 pm, Joe English wrote:
> Having thought more about the second question, I now believe that
> the only thing that's intrinsic to an XML document is
> the stuff that's manifest in the parse tree: GIs, attributes,
> and content. Everything else -- the principal type, auxilliary
> types, architectural forms, etc., -- are imposed by the observer.
Precisely what I have been saying.... (though I would say "interpreter
rather than "observer").
In compilers, you usually (not always, usually) go from
source->AST->object tree with something doing the conversion from
AST->object. XML is the same. The XML core DOM is roughly an AST...
and we interpret that as we wish. Even humans go through the phase of
parsing into "elements" then determining their "type" .
The magic is is in the interpreter, not the data.
