Re: new draft xml proc profiles doc

James Fuller <jim@webcomposite.com> writes:

> Admittedly they are more for human parsing, but as they precede the
> profile's precise definition I thought this was the right place for
> rationale to go as any clarification can be quickly addressed.

To me they appear so terse as to be perplexing, rather than helpful,
to the casual reader.

>> What problem are they meant to be addressing?
>
> With no intro text to any of the profiles, a reader skimming the
> document is forced to parse the entire document just to get an
> understanding of any single profile's essential nature.I see this text
> as a courtesy to the casual reader.

Fair enough.

>> If we have to have them, could they be collected together and moved
>> somewhere else?
>
> We could (assuming we give links as well to the formal profile
> description) but the further away we place the text from its formal
> description we then force the reader into the hyperlink square dance,
> which I try to avoid in small documents such as this.

I had in mind to just put them at the beginning of section 2, just
before section 2.1, perhaps in the following form:

  The four profiles defined here identify four increasingly rich
  profiles, in terms of kinds of processing and amount of information
  provided to applications:

  The Basic profile, adding only support for xml:base processing to
  the minimum required by the XML specification, in order to allow for
  correct resolution of relative URIs;

  The Id profile, which adds xml:id processing in order to identify
  IDs in the possible absence of complete attribute type declaration
  information;

  The External Declarations profile, which adds mandatory external
  markup declaration processing in order to guarantee all
  information-affecting declarations are processed;

  The Full profile, which adds xi:include processing, in order to
  transclude linked infosets as parsed XML or as text, recursively as
  required.

ht
-- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
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Received on Thursday, 15 December 2011 12:19:06 UTC