A New Hope (was Re: Storing Lots of Fiddly Bits (was Re: What is XML for?))

[spreitze at parc.xerox.com]

Right!  I think a significant part of the problem here is that people are realizing that XML's data model is not as expressive as they'd like.  For example, XML's entity structure looks like a semi-labelled graph (vertices are labelled (with entity tags) but edges are not labelled), whereas many other data models (e.g., RDF) let you label both the edges and the vertices.  Sure, you can encode any other data model into XML, and we'll probably have to as long as we're dealing with XML 1.0.  In fact, I've already seen strong proponents of multiple, different ways of encoding fully labelled graphs into XML.  But programmers would rather deal with application-domain constructions in more expressive data modelling systems (e.g., one that supports fully labelled graphs).  No amount of XML-to-XML transformation and/or efficiency hacking is going to change this.  It seems to me that one plausible way out of this conundrum is for the XML Schema WG to recognize (1) the need for schemas to be written in terms of more expressive data modelling systems, (2) the need to support a variety of encodings of those data models into XML, and (3) the need for a schema to describe a particular encoding (the one desired for the schema at hand) of the schema's data model into XML.

Mike

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