Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: T. Nelson -- Doesn't understand XML?

Author:Dennis Peterson
Posted:11/10/1999; 12:29:28 PM
Topic:T. Nelson Critique of Embedded Markup
Msg #:12949 (In response to 12940)
Prev/Next:12948 / 12950

the meaning of an XML document is entirely up to whatever/whoever interprets it. Naturally, we wish for, hope for, a consensus interpretation of a wide variety of tagsets to evolve.

Well there's a little more to it than that. Poke around on W3C and see what they have to say about namespaces and schema. We may disagree on the meaning of the tag, but if we each publish pointers to documents that define what we mean, we can keep it straight. If I publish a number saying that the price of my widget is 12 dollars, you are free to interpret that and say my widget weighs twelve pounds. You're right, the meaning of the XML as interpreted by you is now that my widget weighs twelve pounds. But you would be wrong. Your interpretation is erroneous according to verifiable fact.

As for complex computational interpretations, somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can include javascript in xsl. Once the xml is translated into the DOM, you can do what you want with it.



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