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Nils Klarlund (klarlund@research.att.com)
Wed, 19 Jan 2000 12:22:33 -0500
A so-called "last call" working draft has been issued by the W3C for XML information set. Apparently, this draft has not provoked a lot of discussion. The draft solves the problem: what is the mathematical object that an XML document represents? The answer is a "tree" defined according to some rather natural rules. Although the document is cleanly written, it introduces some very cumbersome language, which will almost guarantee that future XML specifications will become unnecessarily hard to read (just look at the current XML Schema document, part 1). Would it not be in the interest of the XML community to encourage the authors use language that mortals understand (nodes, trees, etc)? I don't believe the Information Set in its current formulation should be accepted. Am I alone in this belief? If not, then we might perhaps be able to convince the authors, who have otherwise done a fine job, to tidy up the language and the connection to DOM. /Nils PS: below I have enclosed the e-mail that I sent to the official discussion list yesterday (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-infoset-comments/) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- Subject: XML infoset: please don't Dear working group members: XML Information Set terminology unfortunately seems to be having adverse effects. I just started rereading the XML Schema draft and choked right away on the sentence: "An element information item is the component of an infoset which corresponds to an element." No one should be forced to write like that! Another example, "XML Schema: an XML element information item which, along with its descendants, satisfies all the Constraints on Schemas in this specification" This should have been: "XML Schema: an element node which satisfies all the Constraints on Schemas." These and many more examples are solid road blocks to the furthering of XML; personally, they don't make my blood boil, but among the public, some are enraged (see recent mailings to comp.text.xml). I then tried to comprehend what an element information item is by reading the XML Information Set note. Nothing really deep it turns out: it's a node in a tree representation of an XML document. My objection is that there are now two (at least) different tree models of XML: DOM and XML information sets. They are both justified, but I believe they should be unified in what is (or should be) an obvious way: * DOM, being the finer model, is the starting point; the tree model is something any programmer can understand, and the most detailed one. * DOM-I are trees gotten from trees in DOM by a mapping that convert CDATA to text and applies concatenate text nodes (by using normalize()) (and a couple of other tricks, more complicated it shouldn't be). Canonical XML can now be explained by a simple transformation from DOM-I. I would encourage that the XML Information Set be substantially simplified. Please put stakes through verbiage like "XML element information item." And, XML Information Set should be explainable in one paragraph departing from DOM. Then, make this paragraph a part of DOM2 (along with canonical XML, perhaps). Thanks, /Nils xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ or CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 Please note: New list subscriptions now closed in preparation for transfer to OASIS.
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