On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 04:43:20PM -0700, Michael A. Peters wrote: > Paul M Foster wrote: > >> >> That's the same problem XML has. The original idea was that you could, >> for example, have an invoice, and because it was marked up with the >> appropriate tags, everyone would be able to understand what it meant. > > xml provides a standard way of pointing the reader to a reference > specifying how the document is to be read. > > I have run into problems before (data from biological databases provided > in xml) that do not define the element and attribute semantics. That's a > problem with the content generator, not xml, which I believe is just a > subset of SGML. That's true for web documents, but not for others. That's why I framed the comments the way I did. Things are much more standardized for XML on the web. But in non-web contexts, there is often no reference to a DTD. The developers know what it is, but it's not referenced in the XML file itself. Even then, let's say one company calls the invoice date tag "invdate" and another calls theirs "invoice_dt". How does one reconcile this except by tedious manual examination of the standards at both companies? My point was that, among other deep flaws, XML typically suffers from a lack of standardization (except in the web area). Paul -- Paul M. Foster -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
