Integrity in the Hands of the Client

[Mark Baker]

On Fri, 21 Nov 1997, Howard Katz wrote:

> Mark, would you mind expanding just a bit on the following paragraph?

Of course not.

> I'm not seeing what your point is:
> 
> 	BTW, this is the same reason that a stream of serialized-to-XML
> Java 
> 	objects won't have a DTD.  The structure of a set of objects is
> only 
> 	guaranteed to be known at runtime.  But these streams will still
> be 
> 	well-formed.

Picture a container Bean (i.e. the GlasgowSpec - a BeanContext).  When 
you design that container, you only know that it will hold other Beans - 
not necessarily which other Beans.  Your container may publish services 
for use by contained Beans.  It might, and likely will, contain Beans that 
were developed after it was developed.  Some of those Beans might also be 
containers.

Now, imagine serializing that container at runtime.  Can you tell me its 
structure *now* (I mean *right* now, as you're reading this - aka design 
time)?  If not, then you can't use a DTD.  The stream itself will be 
responsible for describing the structure implicitly, not some separate 
static DTD.

Isn't this what well-formed XML documents were meant to address?  That 
you could still create self-describing documents even when you didn't 
know the structure a priori?  Based on some of the discussions I've read 
on the list archives, I do get the impression that this capability of 
XML isn't being used to its fullest potential.

> Thanks,

My pleasure.

MB
--
Mark Baker, Ottawa Ontario CANADA.                Java, CORBA, XML, Beans
http://www.iosphere.net/~markb               distobj at acm.org  ICQ:5100069

   Will distribute business objects for food.


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