On Mon, 24 Sep 2001, Paul Prescod wrote:
> I don't understand the benefit in reinventing all of that work. I'd
> appreciate if you could compare Unicode+XML+XML Schema+SOAP to your
> future projects for LGram levels 0,1,2,3.
SOAP does not use XML-Schema for its typing. SOAP itself may be described
by XML-Schema, but it doesn't leverage XML-Schema; SOAP talks of schemas
in XML for specifying interfaces, but those schemas are SOAP
schemas, not XML-Schema schemas.
XML-Schema does not build upon DTD, because DTD as a notation is not
extensible, contrary to what "XML" means; and DTD couldn't be reasonably
made to fit because syntax-wise it's completely different from the rest of
XML. This makes DTD an eventual dead weight. (I agree that dead weights
don't do much harm though.)
XML attributes are key/value pairs where neither may contain tags. This
leads to an artificial split in the type system, between the tagful and
the tagless. Tagless types have their own little syntax, often
regexp-wise, for which XML itself does not do anything; tagful types take
advantage of XML, but are second-class citizens. Each type is on one side
or the other and there is little logic for deciding which goes where.
LGram is intended as a coherent whole that derives its design more
directly from how programming languages work instead of trying to bolt
that onto a semantic-text-markup system.
A side note: LGram is not against Unicode.
________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard http://hostname.2y.net/~matju
