Re: Semantics (was Re: Inheritance in XML [^*])

W. Eliot Kimber (eliot@isogen.com)
Thu, 23 Apr 1998 14:19:20 -0500

At 07:28 PM 4/23/98 +0100, Michael Kay wrote:
> Paul Prescod wrote:
>>If XML had no semantics, then XSL, XLL and the DOM would
>have to
>>explicitly describe the mapping from syntactic features to
>the abstract
>>nodes that they work on. But they do not, because XML has
>semantic
>>concepts like "element, "element type", "notation" and
>"attribute" that
>>are *described by* the syntax.
>
>
>If those are semantic concepts, then what are the syntactic
>concepts?

tag, attribute specification, character data, entity reference.

One problem in both the XML and SGML specifications is that the
relationship between the syntactic tokens the language defines and the
abstract objects intended to be constructed from those tokens is
underspecified.

Cheers,

Eliot

--
<Address HyTime=bibloc>
W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer
Highland Consulting, a division of ISOGEN International Corp.
2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 95202.  214.953.0004
www.isogen.com
</Address>


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