From: "Mike Champion" <>
> I think, however, that the reason we are in this mess is there is a
> "heritage" in SGML, carried over in SAX, and now in LMNL, that
> markup really is Just Syntax, and data models are something for the application
> to define.
I don't think it is so simple. Many of the SGML people had just been through the
"Property Set" and GROVEs issues: define everything that a parse could
possible return, then have a syntax by which a system can specify
its required data model, then have your parser generate a very lean
GROVE (infoset) which would contain no fluff and fit into your system.
So the absense of a data model is not only because some people think
markup is just syntax, but also because some people, based on the
GROVES/Property Set work, that data models were simply
better left to applications and document types. Not needed by 80/20.
If (following Lou Burnard) a DTD is a theory about a document,
then perhaps a data model is a theory about the markup in a document
set.
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
