- From: Eve L. Maler <elm@arbortext.com>
- Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1997 16:23:12 -0500
- To: digitome@iol.ie (Digitome Ltd.)
- Cc: w3c-sgml-wg@www10.w3.org
I know this thread is a bit old, but it's taken me this long just to *skim*
the collective output of the WG after the holidays.
At 09:20 PM 1/14/97 +0000, Digitome Ltd. wrote:
>Apart from the "<?XML" and ">" bits, this has the downside of being a
brand new
>syntax requiring its own BNF, its own lexical and semantic analysis.
>Would it not be more in keeping with the "XML-mother of all data structures"
>philosophy to encode this as an XML snippit:-
><XML-ARCHS>
> <XML-LINK>
> <ILINKS>
> <ELEMENT name = "ILINK">
> </ILINKS>
> <CLINKS>
> <ELEMENT name = "a">
> <ELEMENT name = "footnote">
> </CLINKS>
></XML-ARCHS>
An alternative is to use a PI, and to give it an "attribute specification
list" as we've done for the header PI, so you could borrow your
start-tag-reading code and use it on PIs. Actually, any pre-defined XML
PIs should also have a "GI" too, so that the different PIs are easily
distinguished. (Should we be adding one to the header PI?)
Below, the mock GI is "linkelems" and the mock attributes are "ilinks" and
"clinks":
<?XML linkelems ilinks="ilink" clinks="a footnote"?>
If we make any pre-defined PIs stick to this SGML-like format, it would
even be useful to define them (informationally) with mock ELEMENT and
ATTLIST declarations in the spec.
PI summaries such as this are starting to look really good to me. They
should be easily parsable and can convey the necessary AF information
without reliance on #CURRENT-like precedence or painful redundancy. The
only (arguably) better mechanism would be multiple ATTLISTs.
Eve
Received on Friday, 24 January 1997 16:26:29 UTC