[XML-SIG] Marshalling to XML, again

[Jack Jansen]

Recently, "A.M. Kuchling" <amk1@erols.com> said:
> There's been some discussion of marshalling scripting language data
> types on the Casbah list and on the Perl-XML list recently; Dave
> Winer's suggestion for XML-RPC bears some relation to this.  It would
> be very useful if some common DTD was agreed upon, which would allow
> painlessly exchanging data between Python and Perl, Frontier, or
> whatever.

This used to be my view, but after a bit more thinking I think that
what we want is not a common DTD but a number of easily convertible
DTDs, possibly with a common subset. The various object types in the
various languages each have their ideosyncracies, and it may be
important to keep these. Unless you have to convert the data
structures to your language of choice, in which case you want to read
the objects in the most logical but still representable form, of
course.

The question then is whether it is possible, upon reading an XML
representation of a yet-unknown language, to automatically convert the 
objects to the nearest representation of your language.
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