Re: 2.1 a-d: Link Recognition by Reserved Attribute?

At 5:35 PM -0600 2/17/97, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>On Wed, 12 Feb 1997 16:53:57 -0500 Tim Bray said:
>>2.1.a Should we allow link recognition via a reserved attribute?
>
>I assume this means "as described in sec. 2.1 of the draft of
>31 January", so <blort XHL-="tlink">xxx</blort> is identified as
>a 'tlink'.
>
>Yes.  And (hard minimalism) this should be the only sanctioned
>mechanism.  There is no way around allowing this; there is no need
>for anything more.

I don't remember what I said, but I like this (but only if attlists can be
split, if not, we _have_ to use PIs to implement a new declaration).

>Come to think of it, if we *don't* call it an AF, we don't need to
>explain what AFs are, and we can save ourselves the trouble.  A
>brief note in the appendix titles Notes for Rocket Scientists will
>suffice; refer to the Extended Facilities Annex there and say
>wisely but inscrutably "The alert reader will have noted that these
>are architectural forms as defined in ...".

On balance this is the best approach. AFs simply mean elements that are
processad based on attributes, that satisfy some constraints. And we don't
need to drag HyTime in to explain that.
>
>>2.1.d If we allow such recognition, what should the attribute be, and
>>      what should be the values for each element type we define?

>It should be named 'XML-form' (lose the trailing hyphen, at all
>events), and it should allow the specification not only of the
>GI of the architectural form but also the specification of which
>attributes in the actual DTD correspond to which attributes of the
>AF.  If you think it makes sense to allow users to name their own
>element types, but not the attributes, think again.

I'm not sure about this. I agree that it seems to make sense, but then why
not redefine the XML-FORM attribute -- and then we're 5 times more meta-
than we need for the task. I still incline to keep the attnames short and
just fix them. I like the flexibility of the other, but I can't yet feel
that it's worth having to explain an "attribute-mapping attribute" to the
unfortunate reader of the spec.

>
>The values should be whatever names we give the architectural forms
>and their attributes.  I'd be happy if they were recognizable words,
>or recognizable abbreviations of words, in some human language,
>which rules out [a-zA-Z]link.  I realize this means 90% of the
>serious proposals are gone; sorry.

But if we could find a reason to use blink it would be so amusing!

The return of the repressed, with a vengeance!

  -- David

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David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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Received on Thursday, 20 February 1997 21:04:35 UTC