My $0.02 on an obscure and difficult, but simple point,
At 07:12 PM 7/3/2003, Bill wrote:
Didier Says...
<As you know, XML is not a language per se but more a set of rules used to
created languages. The main advantage is that these produced languages share
a common syntax and therefore some generic tools can be used for an entire
family of languages. One of these generic tool is XSLT. >
Actually XML is very much a language; i.e., it has a well defined set of
terminal symbols and a grammar describing which strings are acceptable as
strings of the language. Obviously there are a number of parsers out there
that utilize this language definition in order to parse these strings.
Speaking as a student of "language", I note that both of you are correct.
The word "language" is (correctly) used in (at least) two senses. Bill
notes how in a formal definition useful to developers of computer
processors, XML fits the definition of a language in that it has a grammar,
etc. But Didier is also correct, in that XML does not define what might be
called an "application language" (something that describes/instructs
something), but rather is a framework within which such can be implemented.
It's especially confusing since XSLT both is such an application language,
and is designed to work on (therefore refer to, describe, specify) such a
language. XSLT and XML are both "meta-languages" in that
* XML uses language (the XML Rec's definition of well-formedness; also
schemas etc.) to describe rules to make or specify a language (an
"application tag set")
* XSLT deploys a language (including XPath) to describe inputs and outputs
of a process of linguistic translation or transformation
Readers who enjoy such bewilderments can find more in my Extreme paper of
last year, a copy of which appears at
http://www.piez.org/wendell/papers/signsystems.pdf.
Cheers,
Wendell
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