Re: [xml-dev] The Goals of XML at 25, and the one thing that XML now needs

On Wed, 21 Jul 2021 00:45:31 +1000, Rick Jelliffe

<[email protected]> wrote:

| Arjun wrote:

|  *Or maybe I'm not getting the point here?*

| 

| Automatic data binding.  For a datatype to be attached to the parse tree

| (DOM etc) as a primitive type (a la C), something has to be told to take

| the text value and convert it: it could be a program, it could be a schema,

| or it could be from instance syntax (i.e. delimiters and lexical patterns).

Isn't that the job of the ETL subsystem responsible for loading a DOM

that is - or should be! - fit for purpose? (But yes, working with

generic DOMs would place that burden on the application.)  

| So lets say I have a XSLT script which decorates an incoming document of a

| standard format with an ISO8601 date in an attribute @D.

Or a LPD?  (Nah. Too bad ISO8879 bollixed the definition of LINK.)

| Contrast this with a richer syntax  where the parser (or transducer is the

| right CS term?)  can do those steps automatically with no configuation or

| coding of that on the server side.

The trouble with that is the universe of such useful auto-conversions

is unbounded.  Why stop at ISO8601 dates?  (How about Roverdates[*],

or DbaseIIdates, which are YYYYMMDD, 32-bit ints in C parlance?)

Customizing the ETL layer seems wiser, from a system design POV.

[*] After Rover, Salomon Brothers' hoary database (back then, some

well-known databases on Wall Street had names like Spot and Fido...)

| The thing is, it is ridiculous (IMHO) to claim that an ISO 8601 date is

| something that we really need freedom to allow clients to interpret

| differently

I always thought the argument was to leave to the client the decision

to use ISO8601 at all, as opposed to some other scheme.

 

| Instead of datatype, it might be good for SGML-ers to consider it in 

| terms of NOTATION. 

Now there's an idea! (And bring in data attributes as well?)

| But SGML did not provide a way to declare the NOTATION of an

| attribute value, doubly not providing it for DTD-less documents.

Actually, Annex K in the WebSGML TC did, but they could have added

that for elements as well.

    http://users.nyct.net/~aray/sgo/dcnsyntax.txt

(That went nowhere, of course, and now that Google has fubar-ed its

Dejanews takeover, the CTS archive is inaccessible altogether.) 

| I think it is entirely reasonable and SGML-ish to want to specify the 

| notation used for some attributes.

The case for DTD-less documents is harder, and I think intractable

within the confines of the spartan syntax of XML.  There are other

punctuation characters that could be put to good use.  And the case of

simple elements, with #PCDATA content models, are very suitable

candidates for content notations and shorthand based on the old NET

style:

<myItem someAtt="someVal" /data content here/>

This can be extended with other content delimiters

    <myItem format="iso8601" /@2021-07-20/>

And so on.  I don't think we can get by with just the current syntax.

 

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