Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: File-tpye plug-in architecture for Arch?

[Charles Duffy]

On Mon, 2003-12-22 at 08:33, Thomas Zander wrote:
> It will probably lead you to the conclusion that the simpleness of XML is its 
> power in that it makes loose data structured data.  And that structured data 
> can be manipulated.

Not in an intelligent way by tools that know nothing about the
semantics. Particularly with DTDs as ones' only mechanism of validation,
being able to determine that a new document is semantically (as well as
syntactically) valid is simply something that a naiive merge tool can't
do.

Oh, sure, it'll work for a limited set of documents -- those for which
every syntactically valid document also has valid semantic meaning --
but form guarantees valid meaning no more in an XML document than in a
set of Pascal records or C structs.

For that matter, I can think of a number of cases where simple changes
could be made to a document which, when merged, would no longer validate
against the original document's DTD. Try telling users they need to fix
the structure of their document before they can edit it in the app they
made it in, and see how they like that!