From: James Tauber (JTauber@bowstreet.com)
Date: Wed Feb 23 2000 - 10:54:13 PST
> XML is not a "language" at all, because it carries zero semantics.
> It is even less of a language than HTML.
[...]
> XML is a tree serialization format, no more and no less.
But in as much as it is a tree serialization format, it *does* have
semantics.
In an XML document, '<', '</', '>', etc have a meaning. They mean the open
of a start tag, or the open of an end tag or the close of a tag
respectively.
The semantics is just operating at a lower layer than the semantics of a
particular XML vocabulary like XHTML.
At an even lower layer, Unicode and a character encoding scheme have
semantics. A UCS-2 0x0041 *means* the character 'A'.
One layer's semantics, is another's syntax. Unicode's semantics feeds XML
1.0's syntax. XML 1.0's semantics feeds a specific vocabulary's syntax (as
defined by a schema). That vocabulary's semantics then drives an XML
application.
James
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