Re: Inheritance in XML [^*]

Tim Bray (tbray@textuality.com)
Thu, 23 Apr 1998 07:43:36 -0700


At 03:51 PM 4/23/98 +0200, james anderson wrote:
>the recommendation does, in deed, assert a semantic for xml documents.
...
>the xml recommendation defines a two relations among elements (subsumption and
>precedence), defines a (yes) language for describing these relations (the dtd
>entities), asserts three states for documents (valid, invalid, and
>unspecified), and specifies how to infer which state a document is in based
>its content.
>
>this is a "semantic"....

Reasonable people may disagree. I believe that sequence and
containment are purely syntactic in nature and imply no semantic
whatsoever. Similarly I see no "semantic" in asserting that my butt
is currently placed on top of a chair, or that this chair is currently
placed in front of my computer.

>it is disheartening to read where attention is deflected from the issue by
>claiming that no semantic was intended.

Get real. You may choose to argue that containment and sequence
constitute, in some philosophical framework, "semantics", but the claim
that no semantic was *intended* is unchallengeable because in point of
fact when we wrote the spec we considered that what we were describing
was syntax. -Tim