Hi,
Chris said:
Most likely, IMHO, XML will be "supplemented" by a host of other higher
level languages. See
http://www.scriptics.com/products/connect/whyTcl.html
for a fairly good description of why you need a higher level language on top
of XML.
Didier reply:
There is several false statements in the referred page. For instance the
following sentence:
<extract>XML is a data representation: it provides a powerful and flexible
way of representing many different kinds of structured data. However, by
itself XML is static. It has no operational or functional component, so it
can't actually do anything. <extract>
is false when a language which is Turing complete is based on XML. Such
language is XSLT. Can we say that the construct <xsl:for-each> is data?
Obviously no since it is a procedural construct. It is like saying that tcl
is static and can't actually do anything. Obviously, this is true if we have
only a tcl text document. This document is becoming alive when interpreted.
This is the same thing for XML or more particularly for a domain language or
data structure encoded in XML. The text needs to be interpreted to be
transformed into something alive exactly like for a tcl text document.
So what is XML. A meta markup language. It can be used to encode data,
documents or procedures. XML provides the syntax. Interpreters hooked on an
XML parser able to recognize the XML syntax can then interpret the elements
and either build an internal tree structure (i.e. an information set), do
some operation or whatever the interpreter does.
Obviously the scriptic team needs to update their text. But we have to keep
in mind that they are selling their stuff, not explaining what XML is :-))
This said: we can say that an XML document is nothing but a way to store
some data or procedural structure in a text format. Interpreters that could
be created in tcl or whatever transform the text into data structure or into
some action. We can say also that an XML document is a serialized version of
an information set.
Cheers
Didier PH Martin
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