On Thu, 8 Dec 2005, David Woolley wrote:
> I would say that document is a particularly bad name because all true
> markup language files are documents.
For some definition of "document". In some circles, "document" implies
documenting something and an attempt at factual correctness; calling
a poem, a comic strip, an image gallery, or an empry questionnaire
a "document" would not be quite adequate. We use the word "document"
in a broad sense, however, in many contexts just because we need
a word for all kinds of stuff we work with in word processing,
in web authoring, etc.
> As such, I'd say that there was an
> implied <document></document> around every piece of XML.
Why would you do that?
Maybe a well-designed markup language would have a finite collection
of possible top-level elements, so that the name of the root element
(to use SGML and XML terminology) would classify "documents".
The name <html> is inappropriate partly because it suggests compatibility
that isn't meant to exist.
If we think we need _a_ name for the root element, I would vote
for <root>. It says nothing about content or meaning, and that's a great
asset. It's short, and it's technobabble, corresponding to the nature
of the _concept_.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Thursday, 8 December 2005 09:12:20 GMT
