Simon St.Laurent wrote:

>  No one who started from XML documents would ever be likely to create
>  such nonsense, but people who start from the Infoset seem frequently to
>  create freakish markup that demonstrates the perils of manipulating
>  abstractions and forgetting about the underlying syntax.


Bingo, Simon.

I think this describes the real root of the problem better than anything 
I've ever seen advanced. When spec writers and/or developers  make the 
(an) infoset the base target, the whole thing starts to unravel.

An *XML infoset* should describe an abstract data model that captures 
the meaningful information contained in an *XML document*. When you 
start with the infoset, its all too easy to think of the 
UnicodeWithPointyBrackets as a "convenient serialization syntax" and 
promptly drive off of the road.

The poisonous problem is that the folks that start with the XML Infoset, 
but diverge from it, then feel empowered to make the markup do what 
their new (now only peripherally related to XML) infoset needs.

-kip


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