Michael Champion wrote:
>
> This gets into another point -- there is a widely-held belief by many
> (most?) XML developers/analysts that XML *is* a text markup format, so
> "XML objects" is an oxymoron. See
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Oct/0036.html for the
> most recent outbreak of the long running debate on this point . (Note
> that I personally am on the "you also need a data model" side, but that
> doesn't mean that I'm ready to accept ASN.1 as an "XML" technology!).
>
Remember that asn.1 has several aspects -
1) A schema language
2) A number of encodings for encoding instances of asn.1 messages, such
as BER and PER - and now _an_ xml encoding.
3) A syntax for writing out instances of data structures with their
values in a human-readable text format.
Some asn.1 encodings contain enough internal "tagging" that they can be
decoded without an external schema, some (e.g., PER) do not.
So far as I know, there is no asn.1 equivalent to the infoset, but there
is no need for one (modulo internal datatypes of various computers and
languages) because an asn.1 schema inherently describes data structures
(that can be realized in memory, for example), which xml without an
infoset does not.
Cheers,
Tom P
