RE: Metaphors that the XML community uses

Thanks for interesting reference Roger.

 

With apologies to the Bard: there are more trees in heaven and earth than
are dreamt of in our philosophy.

 

*	wikipedia Tree (disambiguation)
*	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(disambiguation)

 

all the best, Don

-- 

Don Brutzman  Naval Postgraduate School, Code USW/Br        [email protected]

Watkins 270,  MOVES Institute, Monterey CA 93943-5000 USA    +1.831.656.2149

X3D graphics, virtual worlds, Navy robotics https://
faculty.nps.edu/brutzman

 

From: Roger L Costello <[email protected]> 
Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2022 4:17 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [xml-dev] Metaphors that the XML community uses

 

"An XML document is a tree."

 

Obviously an XML document is not a tree. I look out my window and I see a
bunch of (real) trees. XML documents don't look like those trees.

 

When we say that an XML document is a tree, we are using a metaphor. We are
relating one thing (an XML document) to another thing (tree), as a way to
help understand and describe the first thing (XML documents). 

 

Mary Holstege wrote a paper on metaphors that we use with XML. Here is the
introduction in her paper:

Computer information and software are abstractions. We comprehend them
through the use of metaphors. Different metaphors lead us to understand our
information and our processing of it in different ways. They lead us to
focus on certain aspects of the experience over other aspects.

This paper examines some metaphors we use to talk about markup. Being
mindful of what our metaphors are telling us implicitly allows us to see
what we are missing.

 

See analyzed a bunch of XML documents - using XQuery and AWK - to identify
which metaphors are used.

 

https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol21/html/Holstege01/BalisageVol21-Hol
stege01.html
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