XML data typing (Re: XML as middle ware between CORBA and COM)

[Peter Murray-Rust]

At 23:26 28/03/98 -0800, John Tigue wrote:
[...]
>
>I've been writing a lot of code which proves that XML works just fine for
>software component object inter-communication and in some ways is even
>superior to current systems (even if it weren't better, how else would you
>do such things in a Web-native fashion if not in XML). As a result of my
>research I have published a few DTDs related to such matters. They can be
>found at: http://xml.datachannel.com/WebBroker/DTDs.html I presented my
>findings at the XML Conference in Seattle last week. A presentation slide
>show is at http://xml.datachannel.com/public/presentation/XMLSeattle/
>
In the slides, John hinted that there was progress in dataTyping XML. I am
particularly interested in this and would like to know if this is likely to
result in a re-usable protocol (or if not, whether we could pursue this on
XML-DEV a la SAX).

Historically this first surfaced from a proposal (I think) by Tim Bray -
XML-TYPE (listed in XML-DEV), but became subsumed in XML-DATA. I would be
pleased to see progress made along those lines, but don't want to have to
implement the whole of the current draft for my purposes (numeric values in
technical documents). In the same way as XLL has split into xptr and xlink,
it could make sense to split XML-data into the primitive types and the
structural part. 

IMO the primitive types would be very heavily re-used in XML applications
and would prevent a fragmentation where everyone ends up defining FLOAT and
so on in very slightly different incompatible ways. Now that we have (or
will have) namespaces to separate these from everything else there should
be nothing to stop this. It would be the most widely used re-usable set of
XML information objects.

[If this is already part of a formal W3C activity with milestones, please
forgive my ignorance and lead me to it.]

	P.
 

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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