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Tom Bradford sez: "Everything is *about* something else, including markup and namespaces." True. Every system is meaningful in a context of use. Often a context of use is another system. Markup is pretty dreary unless a bigger system hosts it. "If something wasn't about something else, it would have no reason to exist." On the other hand, are nails about wood? No nails are about attaching wood to wood and so are screws but they have to be the right screws and nails. Given the roof, the wrong nails spot the white paint brown. "Markup and namespaces are *about* labeling things, but so are many other formats, so XML has to be *about* something more than that in order to justify its existence." No. Anymore than nails have to justify their existence by knowing they are used in wood. The carpenter has to know that. Nails just have to attach. Why XML? XML is just the nail that won. Smarter ASCII (unicode). CSV is still there as are dozens of other labeling systems. It wasn't so important to choose SGML for the web. It was important to choose something. The contexts of use are the problem. XML is used to attach a lot of different kinds of wood in a lot of different locales. Given a sufficiently large context, labels becomes entropic. We slow that down by limiting the contexts. What happens in an element that has no namespace and only lexically, a parent, is that it has no referenceable context. It is a semantic orphan, a nail in search of something to attach to. What one side here wants is that a nail coming out of a given process (validation against a schema) also possess the coating that lets it be used to hammer exposed wood (a post validation information set is not the original nail). The other side just wants it to be the same nail without the coating. Neither side is wrong; they need nails from different boxes. >If it wasn't about anything do you think you would have put so much time >into it? He didn't need a reason to have a son. He probably doesn't need one to work with anything he loves. He likes *the system*. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
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