xml uses and books to read

[Ken Ray]

> "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?"

In my (albeit limited) experience, it has been the latter. Many times the
data tends to expose a "natural" structure. For example, a product inventory
could naturally break down to:

<inventory>
  <product>
    <part></part>
    <part></part>
    <part></part>
  </product>
  <product>
    <part></part>
    <part></part>
  </product>
</inventory>

etc.

Graham, it might be good to look at the documentation for my XML Library,
which goes into some detail about XML and has examples of how it's used:

http://www.sonsothunder.com/products/metacard/downloads/xmllibdocs.pdf

(it's about 462K, FYI)

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/