xml uses and books to read

[Graham Samuel]

On Sun, 11 Apr 2004 18:10:15 -0700, Richard Gaskin 
<ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:

>[...]
>XML is just data given structure by putting it between starting and
>ending tags.  Though an increasing number of applications use it for
>data storage, its primary benefit is in exchanging data with other apps.
>
>So once you find a task for which XML would be a good way to exchange
>data, find out which tags the others apps use and parse those out to get
>the data you're after.

Richard, you are the king of commonsense! This simple idea has made me more 
aware of the **idea** of XML than many another text I have had the 
misfortune to read.

The other bit of info about the **principles**  of XML that is missing for 
me is the answer to the question:

"If XML tags and structures can be made to represent pretty well anything, 
how does the user community for a particular dialect/ language/ data model 
expressed in XML communicate? I mean, if a particular set of XML tags and 
structures is about chemical compounds or the parts of a bicycle or 
whatever, is there a generalised metalinguistic way of defining what the 
representation means, or does the community share some more or less 
informal description and then conform to that?"

Good luck to Andrew - I'd  like a report about how he gets on!

Graham


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Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France