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XML-Data adds several features that hard-core object oriented folks appreciate: 1. True inheritance, with semantics more similar to that of OO languages than indirect mechanisms used to simulate inheritance when using architectural forms. Architectural forms do not really give us what OO folks call inheritance. 2. Reflection - the ability to modify the content model at run-time. 3. The syntax for the content model is the same as the syntax for data, making it easier to write code to manipulate both. Of course, all existing SGML and XML tools know how to deal with DTDs, and this is a rather major departure from traditional SGML. It has not been blessed by any standardization committee. Given the way Microsoft has approached Java, insisting that it need not implement the portable libraries everyone else is using, and encouraging people to use their platform-specific libraries instead, it is easy to wonder what will happen to the SGML world if Microsoft is in control of an alternative method of specifying content models. According to MS representatives, there *will* be tools to transform XML-Data content models into DTDs, but still, the "real" content model is in the XML-Data. Is it worth it in order to gain true inheritance and reflection? For some applications, it may well be. If Microsoft controls XML-Data, and some vendors support it but others do not, will we have the same kind of market fragmentation that we have in the Java world today, where Microsoft is refusing to support the Java standard libraries, and instead insists that developers should use their own libraries, which run only on Windows operating systems? Who knows! Jonathan *************************************************************************** Jonathan Robie jwrobie@m... http://www.mindspring.com/~jwrobie POET Software, 3207 Gibson Road, Durham, N.C., 27703 http://www.poet.com *************************************************************************** xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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