- From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- Date: Mon, 07 May 2001 09:42:49 -0400
- To: "Seth Russell" <seth@robustai.net>, "Aaron Swartz" <aswartz@swartzfam.com>, "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: "William F. Hammond" <hammond@csc.albany.edu>, <mozilla-mathml@mozilla.org>, <www-talk@w3.org>
At 06:15 AM 5/7/01 -0700, Seth Russell wrote: > > XML program structures, even without validation running, are typically far > > too brittle to ignore extra information caused by extra child > > elements. You'd get a lot of strange errors where documents that could be > > processed in certain contexts would fail in others. > >But what is actually at error here: the brittle processors, or the XML >documents? I would say it was the brittle processors ... what would you >say? Incidentally I can't form a "valid to the author" response to all >the emails that appear in my mailbox ..... so I don't see why one could >assume that some XML processor should be expected to do any better. I'd say it's a best practice issue, not an error. The tools (DOM, XPath) commonly used to process XML documents require that developers have some concept of what structures they'll be using. If there's been an error made, it's at the level which defines such processing. SAX does make it easier to ignore extra markup than the tree-based systems, but I'm not sure that was a deliberate design choice or a side-effect of event-based processing. > > I've argued for a long while that flexibility (not standardization) of > > vocabularies is the real lesson of XML, but that's not reflected in >current > > practice. > >Could you sketch for us what "flexibility of vocabularies" means to you ? Generally speaking, it means that developers and users can create vocabularies which are meaningful to them, and not necessarily to expert committees. I've got a very sketchy outline at: http://www.simonstl.com/articles/selfish2.htm It's not done yet, probably won't be for a few weeks, but it might give an outline. Note that I expect transformations to deal with a lot of the issues described above, not inherently flexible processing. After years of working with 'flexible HTML processing', I can't say I'm fond of unpredictable error-correction and the like. There's also a presentation focusing on the role of transformations in XML at: http://www.simonstl.com/articles/transform/transform.html Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly & Associates XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed. XHTML: Migrating Toward XML http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books
Received on Monday, 7 May 2001 09:42:43 UTC