Re: Element Structure for XML (Clause 7)

Various such schemes have been suggested in the past (Lynne Price
once worked on such a suggestion in ANSI X3V1 TG8, but I don't
believe it went anywhere.)

ArborText has always had an ArborText-specific initial keyword
for all its PIs (usually "Pub" from our earlier "Publisher" product).

Codifying something like this in XML would be a good idea.  If SGML Open
can help such codification with some Technical Resolutions or Technical
Memos, I'd be glad to offer to bring that up there.

paul

> Date:         Wed, 11 Sep 96 16:23:30 CDT
> From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen <U35395@UICVM.CC.UIC.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Element Structure for XML (Clause 7)
> To: W3C SGML Working Group <w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org>
> 
> Like Paul, I guess I think PIs aren't all that hard to deal with,
> though it might be nice to specify a canonical method of escaping
> PIC within them.
> 
> The one thing I have most missed in PIs as currently constituted is a
> reasonably simple, mostly reliable method for different applications
> to avoid tripping over each other's PIs.  I have the impression
> that some applications try to make all of their PIs begin with
> some keyword (say, the name of the application), so that they can
> readily tell, by looking just at the first token of the PI, whether
> the PI could possibly be theirs or not.  So a document with
> 
>   <?TeX \vskip 0.75in>
>   <?WScript .sp 4.5 a>
>   <?teihtml filebreak>
> 
> could be processed by applications which recognize the keywords
> TeX, WScript, and teihtml, and each application can know from the
> keywords which PIs it should pay attention to, and which it can
> (and should!) ignore.
> 
> Such a self-assigned keyword system is not, of course, 100% reliable,
> but it's somewhat more reliable than having no such pattern at all.
> 
> Is this a convention for using PIs that XML ought to require or
> recommend?
> 
> -C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 11 September 1996 18:44:56 UTC