Re: More proposals -- and some critical implementation issues

At 13:12 31/12/96 -0500, David G. Durand wrote:
>At 6:15 AM 12/31/96, Martin Bryan wrote:

>>I thought that it was sufficient to say that if you transmitted the DTD and
>>expect the browser to parse that then you could define a fixed XML attribute
>>in the DTD but if you did not transmit the DTD (because the browser could
>>not process it) then you had to add the XML attribute to all instances of
>>elements that are to exhibit linkedness.
>
>Since we have gone to great lengths to enable an Explorer or
>Navigator-equivalent to avoid processing DTDs, we can't afford to require
>them for linking behavior to work. This is only my opinion, but it's sure a
>hard case to make as part of a sales pitch. Same for the attribute values
>-- the redundancy will be noticable, and make XML look foolish, when it is
>in fact merely being punctilious.
>
Why will the redundancy be noticeable? How many users look at the code
coming into their Netscape browser? The redundancy will only be present when
the file is being transmitted to a dumb browser that cannot handle the DTD.
If it can handle the DTD there will be no redundancy as the attributes won't
need to be added before transmission.

Browsers would only need to be able to identify a few extra attributes,
those identifying XML link AFs. They will need to be able to recognize these
in any case to process XML links. Nobody is suggesting, surely, that
Netscape and Explorer should be able to handle multi-headed XML links
without modification. If we are constrained by what these browsers can do at
present then we might as well give up now.
----
Martin Bryan, The SGML Centre, Churchdown, Glos. GL3 2PU, UK 
Phone/Fax: +44 1452 714029   WWW home page: http://www.u-net.com/~sgml/

Received on Wednesday, 1 January 1997 06:11:14 UTC