Re: (Partial) review of Versioning XML

noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com scripsit:

> In short, I wouldn't emphasize the grammar:  I'd emphasize that it's a 
> subset of well formed XML, and typically (though not necessarily) defined 
> so that the instances have something common in form or purpose.  Aside: 
> though I suppose you could have a language that is the union of all 
> symphonies and shopping lists, I think we don't need to go there;  then 
> again, we can talk about the language of all instances of any sort that 
> just happen to have a version attribute on the root, or an xml:lang 
> attribute on the root, even if we're talking about both shopping lists and 
> symphonies.  We can design document management systems that will manage a 
> wide variety of things, if just a few attributes are maintained in common 
> among them.  That is an important use case, IMO.

In shorter, a language is a (mathematical) set of XML documents.
Note that this precludes us from talking about *the* language of a
document, which I consider to be a Good Thing.

-- 
In politics, obedience and support      John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
are the same thing.  --Hannah Arendt    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

Received on Wednesday, 30 May 2007 14:31:06 UTC