[E-Lang] Minimal-XML (was: Draft Kernel-E DTD & Sketch of translationto debuggable Java)

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

"Mark S. Miller" wrote:

> But on SML, THANK YOU!!  Doing some web searching, SML has turned into
> Minimal-XML, and minimal it is indeed!

Your proposed re-encoding is actually the way data encoding is intended to be done
in XML. Use of attributes for this purpose wasn't appropriate in any case.

However, PLEASE don't use a library that is restricted to Minimal XML. One of the
points of XML is that people can augment it. I can imagine writing transforming
tools that would introduce new tags (i.e. tags not yours) and new attributes. A
correct input mechanism can and should ignore these tags and attributes
successfully when re-importing my augmented XML document. I could even make a case
that it should preserve the augmented DOM information internally so that it can be
further retransmitted.

Also, while I'm thinking about it, please use the XML namespace mechanism. I
propose prefixing all tags by "elang:" thus:

    <elang:callExpr>
         <elang:nounExpr>a</elang:nounExpr>
         <elang:verb>add</elang:verb>
         <elang:nounExpr>b</elang:nounExpr>
     </elang:callExpr>

Remember that in XML the goal is explicitness, not succinctness. XML is primarily
designed as a machine-parsed form, and the version with namespace tags will
compress just as much as the version without.

Jonathan