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Hi Tim, > As for the decision, it was all over in about 45 seconds on one > teleconference, I remember it clearly. Fairly early on in the XML > design process. Someone (maybe me? I forget) said "er, should we do > an API as well?" and James Clark said "isn't the idea that there's > going to be one API that's going to work for all the different > things you want to do kind of silly?" and everyone said "oh, right" > and that was that. But there's a big difference between a data model and an API onto a data model. The Infoset, for example, isn't an API; you could imagine many APIs onto the Infoset, which might reveal different parts of the structure in different ways. I guess that when I've been talking about a "data model" in this thread, I've been talking about the Infoset-level data model rather than the API-level data model. I fully agree that trying to define an API-level data model would be a complete nightmare, even when you're in a committee of 3. But agreeing on an Infoset-level data model is "only" about as burdensome as agreeing on a syntax, at least if my experience with LMNL is anything to go by. Cheers, Jeni --- Jeni Tennison http://www.jenitennison.com/
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