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John, An XML document concretely describes abstract notions. Without concrete representations, an abstract notion may exist but may not be useful for practical purposes. Gertrude Stein comes to mind. I paraphrase: "An XML document is an XML document is an XML document." Mike -----Original Message----- From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@r...] Sent: Friday, January 19, 2001 9:04 AM To: Michael Beddow; xml-dev@x... Subject: Re: What is an XML document? Michael Beddow wrote: > er, where's the other voice in this rather interesting dialogue? > > I'm getting only John, not Danny. Sorry, my error. I mistakenly added xml-dev to a posting to a different mailing list. But a precis of the debate is that Dan thinks "XML document" to be a purely abstract notion defined by a formal rule. Whereas I think it just means "document which is in well-formed XML", where "document" is a concrete notion referring to something that has physical existence. This has practical consequences, because I say an XML document doesn't exist unless every external entity referred to from the document entity exists. Dan says that "exist" is not a useful notion for XML documents, any more than it is for integers. -- There is / one art || John Cowan <jcowan@r...> no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein
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