Re: Comments on GRDDL (using 3rd-party XML schemas with GRDDL) [OK?]

On 24 Jul 2007, at 10:38 , Harry Halpin wrote:

> ...
> I understand that's a perfectly sensible use-case, but not for  
> GRDDL as
> it stands. There is a technical difficulty: Since the schema is not at
> the namespace document and not marked up in the document, how would  
> the
> GRDDL processor ever discover your schema annotations by "following  
> its
> nose" from the source document?

I imagine it happening the same way it happens for schema
processors.  Different schema processors do it differently;
possible mechanisms include invocation-time parameters,
catalogs, local repositories, well-known locations,
dereferencing the namespace name, and of course hints in
the document.

 From this discussion I understand that if a GRDDL processor
allows me to specify where to find schema documents I'd like
to use, then that processor doesn't conform to the GRDDL
spec.  That seems a shame to me.

> For your use-case, since the location of the schema and associated  
> with
> is known by you, but not described the document or namespace document,
> it would make more sense to explicitly write your transformation to  
> RDF
> for the type of vocabulary using something like XProc [2] I think  
> rather
> than GRDDL, or simply use the transformation using a processing  
> language
> like XSLT or XQuery directly.
>
> The only solution would be to add an arbitrary parameter to GRDDL.
> However, we have endeavored in the WG to make GRDDL "parameter- 
> free" and
> instead rely on "following-your-nose"  and "following other specs" to
> find the transformation, and if one wants to add an parameter to GRDDL
> to locate a transformation, one should just use the processing  
> language
> like XSLT or XQuery locally and directly rather than relying on GRDDL,
> since there is no advantage using GRDDL would provide in this case  
> over
> existing software.
>
> Does this answer satisfy you?

It comes a lot closer, thanks.  If the GRDDL spec anywhere says
roughly what you say in the preceding few paragraphs, I think I
probably am satisfied; I'll need to sleep on it to be sure.
(And of course I do not speak for the XML Query and XSL WGs.
Satisfying me is probably a good step toward satisfying the WGs,
but they are distinct concepts.)

Michael

Received on Tuesday, 24 July 2007 19:09:24 UTC