[om] A Proposal for extending OpenMath with XML annotations

[Andreas Strotmann]

Have you considered an alternative along the following lines?  Since you
probably have, this being a rather obvious solution, what's wrong with it?

Suppose there is a (real!) CD "xml".  It would have names like "entity",
"CDATA", "element", "attribute-name", "attribute-value"... all the names
of concepts in the XML standard.  Perhaps even things like "namespace",
but let's not get carried away.

Then, using OMAs and these basic XML building blocks, we would encode the
full glory of the XML object structure in OpenMath along the lines of:
"An XML element is a CDATA string or a sequence of XML elements embedded
in an XML tag. An XML tag consists of its name and a sequence of XML
attributes. An XML attribute consists of a name and a (string) value."
This can be easily expressed in OpenMath using an appropriate combination
of OMAs, OMSs in an XML CD, and OMStrings.

Admittedly, there'd be a lot of wrapping and unwrapping to be done by a
real application, but from the OpenMath perspective this seems like a
perfectly clean way to go about it.

Incidentally, the XML encoding could of course special-case this type of
"application of XML symbols", though it would have to be really careful
because non-XML objects just might be embedded in such an application
tree, after all.

Just my $.02

--    Andreas

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