On Logic and Standards for Structuring Documents

The advent of XML has been widely seized upon as an opportunity to develop document representation standards that lend themselves to automated processing. This is a welcome development and much good has come of it. That said, present standardization efforts may be criticized on a number of counts. We explore two issues associated with document XML standardization efforts. We label them (i) the dynamic point and (ii) the logical point. Our dynamic point is that in many cases experience has shown that the search for a final, or even reasonably permanent, document representation standard is futile. The case is especially strong for electronic data interchange (EDI). Our logical point is that formalization into symbolic logic is materially helpful for understanding and designing dynamic document standards.