RE: [Serialization] IBM-SE-001: Documentization

While I see a use-case for the documentization process, I still think
that there is enough benefit to also have a serialization of basically
element content (text nodes, comments, PIs and element sequences) that
does not add the documentization overhead but can be easily parsed by an
XML parser that allows "fragments".

 

Best regards

Michael

 

________________________________

From: public-qt-comments-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-qt-comments-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of XML Query
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 3:37 PM
To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
Subject: [Serialization] IBM-SE-001: Documentization

 


Serialization Section 2, "Serializing Arbitrary Data Models": This
comment recapitulates a discussion from a recent (21 January) meeting of
the Query and XSLT working groups. It is suggested that the
serialization document should define two separate and independent
processes, possibly called "documentization" and "serialization". 

The documentization process should be defined to convert any Query Data
Model (QDM) instance (which in general may contain zero, one, or many
documents, or documents mixed with non-document fragments) into a QDM
instance that contains exactly one document. This can be done by
replacing each top-level item in the QDM instance by a descriptive
"wrapper" element that labels it with its kind: attribute, atomic value,
element, document, etc. A new synthetic document element is then
inserted as parent of all the wrapper elements.  This documentization
process (unlike the one currently described in Section 2) should apply
successfully to any QDM instance whatsoever. Thus (for example) if the
QDM instance contains multiple documents, the boundaries between these
documents is preserved. If documentization is invoked on a QDM instance
that already contains a single document, that document is nevertheless
wrapped in a descriptive element which is placed under a new synthetic
parent document node (it is treated simply as a sequence of documents of
length one). 

The serialization process then needs to be defined only for QDM
instances that contain exactly one document. A serialization parameter
can be defined to control whether documentization is applied before
serialization (possibly documentization could be defined to occur by
default if the first item in the sequence to be serialized is not a
node). 

--Don Chamberlin