an unfilled need

[Matthew Gertner]

> But what would it discover?  Stylesheets can already tell you how
> <foo> should be rendered in a browser.  What other kind of information
> could reasonably be discovered in the general case besides structural
> validation rules and possibly simple data-typing?  Neither of those is
> going to tell my application much about <foo> if it doesn't know about
> <foo> already.

Wasn't this exactly the point of Jon Bosak's by-now-classic paper about XML and Java? Maybe
this has been generally written off as shameless promotion of Sun's interests, but if so this
seems like a shame to me, since the idea is absolutely brilliant. There should be a way to
associate tags with Java classes (and preferably a generic mechanism that at least opens up
the possibility of associating them with code of any kind). The class in question could be
determined in a number of ways (stylesheet, schema, whatever) and would then consume the
contents of the element, doing something useful. The nice thing about general-purpose
programming languages is that this something could be absolutely anything.

Matthew



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