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At 07:48 PM 3/12/01 +0100, Matthew Gertner wrote: >Let me get this straight. I have the following document: > ><foo> > <value>45.67</value> ></foo> > >What you are saying is that someone might want to treat "value" directly >as something other than a floating point number? Can't speak directly for Walter, but yep. It's totally up to the recipient, IMHO. What's interesting about 45.67? That it's a floating point number? That it includes two sequential pairs of numbers separated by a period, which together form a four-digit sequence? That 45<67? Sure, it gets ridiculous. But unless you have a pre-existing relationship with the recipient, or are the recipient yourself, why do you automatically expect them to share your reading of what's important? >I can easily see how this >element could be transformed into a boolean (e.g. greater than 30) for >display, or into an integer (e.g. through truncation) for some other >processing. But surely the original value in the original document is >always a real number, right? If not, I'd appreciate a more concrete >example. I'm not sure whether I get it. I think you get it just fine. The hard part is getting used to the contingency involved, rather than trying to obliterate it. Contingency isn't well-loved in computing, but it's a pretty normal aspect of everyday communications. Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed. XHTML: Migrating Toward XML http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books
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