>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: Patrick Durusau [mailto:pdurusau@[...].edu] 
> 
>  >(SSL)
>  >The hierarchical issues arise from the particular style of embedded 
>  >markup that XML uses, and there's a serious trade-off there.  XML is 
>  >not as flexible for created labeled structures as it might 
>  be precisely 
>  >because it is typically embedded directly in documents, and because 
>  >XML's creators found ambiguity a problem.
>  >
> 
>  Yes, and the ambiguity solution inherited from SGML was to solve the 
>  problem in syntax, not in the processing layer. Since the ambiguity 
>  problem was solved by Earley in 1970 (Earley, J. (1970) An efficient 
>  context-free parsing algorithm. Communications of the Association for 
>  Computing Machinery, 13(2):94-102) as well as dealt with in NLP and 
>  other disciplines by techniques such as active chart parsing 
>  and parse 
>  forests, I fail to see any reason to continue to with a 
>  solution in syntax.

Are we really done then? There's a lot of work done after Earley, ie
Marcus, (and of which Schematron is possibly a special case, I'm not
sure yet) that suggest to me we're not done without resorting to syntax.
The ideal at the XML level would be not to resort to context-free
parsers that require probabilities (PCFGs). And there's still markup to
deal with, even when it's called punctuation ;)

Bill de hÓra
..
Propylon
www.propylon.com 

 


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