Re: Alternative to x!y (proposal)

I missed this discussion because I was away on business w/o a laptop.
I'm glad that I got to read it in one go because it made it easier for me
to see what was bugging me about where y'all are going with this.

I'd like to make two comments.

1.) Let's not try to "decide" on naming of attributes just yet.
Assuming that we use two attributes, we only need placeholder
names for now. We can/should decide final names later.

2) If we do use two attributes, then this element is starting to look weird 
to me.

	<p:input port="document"     href="http://example.com/input.xml"/>
or
	<p:input port="document"     step="step"              source="result"/>
or
	<p:input port="document">
		<here:document>Here document</here:document>
	</p:input>

Well, to save us from having to explain:

	<p:input port="document" href="http://example.com/input.xml" step="step" 
source="result">
		<here:document>Here document</here:document>
	</p:input>

I would prefer that we make these three different elements, or use nested 
elements:

	<p:input port="document">
		<p:include      href="http://example.com/input.xml"/>
	</p:input>
or	<p:input port="document">
		<p:from         step="step"              output="result"/>			
	</p:input>
or	<p:input port="document">
		<p:here>Here document</p:here>
	</p:input>

Of course, we can name these elements/attributes appropriately later.
And we can use these same child elements on declare-[in|out]put.

I know that it is a lot of extra syntax to achieve what could be encoded
more succinctly. But my guess is that it would be easier to write the
handlers for these four elements than it would be for that one that y'all
are talking about now. Of course, I am not an implementor so I could
be wrong about that. But it sure seems like it would be easier to explain
the constraints on sub-elements than co-constraints on attributes, and
existing schema languages can describe sub-element constraints, whereas
the attribute co-constraints cannot be so described.

Just a couple of thoughts.

Regards,

Murray

Received on Saturday, 26 August 2006 03:22:57 UTC