APIs vs Markup

[David Megginson]

"Don Park" <donpark at docuverse.com> writes:

> >To be concrete. I think it makes a lot of sense
> >to allow a plain text document to parse and
> >emerge at the far end of an XML processor
> >as a single xml:text node consisting
> >of PCDATA.
> 
> Interesting idea.  Only thing preventing that
> is the root element rule which irks me sometimes.
> Something like schematron could reduce the need
> for the root element rule but I think we are stuck
> with it for now.

Hmm ... it sound like what you're looking for is a common API, not a
common markup language.  There's no reason that someone couldn't write
a SAX driver that took

  Hello, world!

and reported

  startDocument()
  startElement("__dummy")
  characters("Hello, world!")
  endElement("__dummy")
  endDocument()

Ditto for a DOM builder.  You could do the same for LaTeX, NROFF, RTF,
comma-delimited fields, Excel spreadsheets, or whatever turns your
crank -- we're talking about APIs, not XML itself (which is simply an
external representation language).

As I've suggested often, there's a many-to-many relationship between
APIs and markup languages.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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