AW: [xml-dev] RFC for XML Object Parsing

Hello Brian,

I wonder if I understood the gist of what you are saying correctly. My understanding of the operation "parsing XML" is the transformation of a string (usually serialized XML) into information content, modelled as an info set, which is a set of items defined in terms of their properties. Practically speaking, the result of parsing is an internal representation of the info set which provides some kind of interface to the information content. In short, parsing provides access to the info set. Would you accept this view?

The "oid" attribute provides a reference to some (perhaps binary) representation of an XML fragment. If an element foo has the @oid attribute, like so
   <foo @oid="123"/>

the information content thus encoded is an info set with a "foo" element item whose children are provided by the internal representation referenced. Yes?

So my main question is how you define the *result* of parsing XML using @oid. Is it an info set, or do you bypass that and are interested in a different end result, e.g. program objects loaded into application memory and not necessarily enabling the construction of an unambiguously defined infoset?

Kind regards,
Hans-Juergen Rennau