First, my +(N+1) on accepting all honest XML related posts on this list
regardless of our opinion of them. I personally have enjoyed some of the
side effects triggered by the questions Roger has raised in the past. I
personally do not consider him a "Troll".
A "Troll" is someone who maliciously intends to disrupt a list by feeding
incisive or annoying commentary with the intent of annoying people or better
yet incite others to annoy each other ('flame war'). Well enough of that
!
Now for my own; I disagree with this slightly:
>> 2. As noted above there are no characters in a computer, only bytes.
Thus, "An XML document is a sequence of characters" actually means that an
XML document is an abstraction >> of the underlying sequence of bytes.
To me this implies XML has to be both
A) On a computer
B) In a text serialized form in bytes
I'm actually not sure since I haven't reread the specs with this in mind but
my opinion is that neither are requirements.
A) If I print or write on paper or whiteboard "<XML/>" is that not still
"XML" ? I don't expect a "XML Processor" to be able to read it, but is not
"not XML" just because its in some other media ? And not represented by
bytes and bits.
B) There is a large body of practice where XML never ends up in text
serialized form in 'bytes'. Not referring to Infoset or XDM. But rather
in-memory "strings" of text serialized XML.
Say a Java program dynamically creates an XML text message, in a Java String
and parses it in memory. No where has it been converted to any encoding in
bytes.
Yet it is still "XM".
So I would say more clearly "XML Is an abstraction of a sequence of
characters" but not necessarily is there 'underlying bytes'.
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David A. Lee
http://www.xmlsh.org
