Re: ICADD support in XML [Was: SGML declaration for XML]

At 01:41 PM 11/11/96 -0500, Murray Altheim wrote:
>"W. Eliot Kimber" <eliot@isogen.com> writes:
>>I'm not sure it's strictly necessary to include LINK in the XML spec as any
>>valid XML document can be processed by an SGML parser that supports LINK in
>>order to generate a new XML instance with the link attributes integrated.
>
>My experience with SP is that nsgmls requires that one modify the SGML
>declaration to include LINK IMLICIT YES in order to process LPDs. Am I
>wrong or misinterpreting your response? This sounds like a workaround
>rather than a change to the advocated specification.

Yes, you have to modify the SGML declaration (just as you would to allow
OMITTAG or any other optional feature not directly supported by XML).  This
is a workaround, but one that is generally available, easy to implement,
and for which no great barriers exist in the XML spec.  

In other words, it's a trival NSGMLS application to take as input a valid
XML document and an LPD and produce as output a well-formed XML document
that includes the ICADD attributes.  In fact, adding this feature to any
SP- or NSGMLS-based SGML-to-WFXML generator is as simple as recognizing
LINK attributes in addition to instance attributes.

I would therefore suggest that anyone thinking of writing such a tool
include support for putting LINK attributes in the instance.

Note that this is really easy if the output is wellformed but not valid,
because you don't have to worry about modifying the document type.  If you
want to produce valid XML documents then you have to update the relevant
attribute lists, which is a bit more difficult (but not impossible using
something like Earl Hood's DTD processing Perl scripts).

Cheers,

E.
--
W. Eliot Kimber (eliot@isogen.com) 
Senior SGML Consulting Engineer, Highland Consulting
2200 North Lamar Street, Suite 230, Dallas, Texas 75202
+1-214-953-0004 +1-214-953-3152 fax
http://www.isogen.com (work) http://www.drmacro.com (home)
"Rats in the morning, rats in the afternoon...if they don't go away, I'll be
re-educated soon..."                 --Austin Lounge Lizards, "1984 Blues"

Received on Monday, 11 November 1996 14:27:29 UTC