On 10/4/05, Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@a...> wrote:
> Costello, Roger L. wrote:
>
> >
> >       Hypothesis: The Role of an XML Document is either as a Storage
> >       Medium or as a Transport Format
> >
> > An XML document may take one of these roles:
> >
> > (1) The XML document is a storage medium.  Applications operate
> > directly on the XML document.
> >
> > (2) The XML document is a (transient) transport format.  Upon arrival
> > at its destination the data is moved into a storage medium (such as a
> > relational database).  Applications do not operate on the XML
> > document.  Applications operate on the data in the storage medium.
> >
>
> On an AJAX client, when it receives an XML document, the data is
> typically not
> "stored" either in native XML nor in some storage medium, but used directly
> by the current script.  So AJAX seems to fit neither of Roger's choices.
>

In some cases you've got an XML format used largely for transport
(from the server to the AJAX client). But if you're doing it properly,
you design the XML for more or less direct display (that's exactly
what I'm working on this morning), so it could also be argued that
this is something else.  Again, I'm not comfortable with Roger's last
two ways of classifying XML: the cases overlap and they don't have
full coverage of all usage.

--
Peter Hunsberger