RE: Dates in XML

Andrew Layman (andrewl@microsoft.com)
Fri, 10 Jul 1998 10:21:51 -0700


This all sounds sensible to me.

-----Original Message-----
From: rbourret@dvs1.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de
[mailto:rbourret@dvs1.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de]
Sent: Friday, July 10, 1998 8:38 AM
To: xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Dates in XML

Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> ...
> I was looking at the XML-Data proposal just today and thinking 'why don't
> we use the primitives it defines, just as they are, without the rest of
> XML-data?'. This encourages me to offer the question to a wider audience.
I
> am seriously missing a specification for primitives - what do other
people
> think about borrowing those from XML-data?

Absolutely. For XSchema 1.1, I vote for a dt:dt attribute on the PCData
element.

The XML-Data spec shows the following ways to specify data types:

Attribute: <size dt:dt="int">8</size>
Subelement: <size><dt:int>8</dt:int></size>
Schema: <elementType id="size"><datatype dt="int"/></elementType>

I believe we should only adopt the first of these for now.

While there are no technical problems with the second, it seems counter to
the
spirit of XML: We are now most closely labeling the value 8 as an int,
rather
than as a size, which is what it really is.

The third is just plain confusing because the datatype subelement is not
part of
the content model. For example, what does the following XML-Data
declaration
mean? The sequence is an integer? I can imagine datatype elements as a
substitute for content models, but not in addition to them. Anything I'm
missing here?

<elementType id="size">
<datatype dt="int">
<group groupOrder="SEQ">
<element type="#shoe"/>
<element type="#shirt"/>
</group>
</elementType>

-- Ron Bourret

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