More XML Identity Angst

Andrew Layman andrewl at microsoft.com
Wed Feb 24 18:48:17 GMT 1999


In a thread about the relative importance or unimportance of markup, David
Megginson wrote "Markup *is* the essential characteristic of XML -- XML is a
markup standard that describes how to represent a hierarchical structure in
a linear sequence of characters."

I agree with the main thrust of this, that markup is essential to XML.  And
not to disagree with Dave, but to amplify his comments, XML with its markup
and other facilities provides valuable structure in addition to
tree-structuring. As others have pointed out, through ids and idrefs,
structures can be represented that are not merely trees, but are directed,
labeled graphs. Entities and notations also extend what is expressed.  Etc.

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