(2006-05-07) Mcgrath Hiding Custom Xml In Microformat

Sean McGrath on hiding custom XML within MicroFormat structures. XML, RDF, UML and so on are not formats so much as meta-formats. Consequently, built-in knowledge of any of these does not amount to zero complexity. XML is not a file format. It is a file format for file formats. This distinction is all important when calculating complexity... Perhaps we can hide custom XML languages inside these standard XML languages, using them as general-purpose semantic containers. We could arrange that XHTML files or ODT files look and feel like ordinary files to XHTML-aware or ODT-aware tools and yet, inside these files we can hide the semantic information we would normally use a custom XML schema for.