Re: locating capabilities vs. anchor awareness

At 12:28 PM 12/23/96 -0800, Derek Denny-Brown wrote:
>Hyperlinking and locating anchors and anchor awareness is all quite easy if
>the only mechanism for locating is ENTITY and IDREF.  A number of people
>have expressed interest in using the TEI style linking (having never used
>seen TEI, that is difficult for me to evaluate.  Anyone have a good
>reference for me where I could get some info/examples of TEI locators?).
>Another group (largely composed of HyTime TC1 editors no less) is carrying
>the HyTime torch.  For this to succeed I believe that either one side needs
>to give in (and I pity the TEI people if they try to get the HyTime people
>to abandon HyTime) or some general mechanism needs to subsume both somehow.

Fortunately, you're incorrect in thinking there is a conflict between TEI
and HyTime.  There is not.

With the TC, HyTime processing can now be integrated with any addressing
scheme you care to support.  All you have to do is define for the HyTime
engine what sort of nodes you'll be returning, which you do by defining a
property set and creating the appropriate software to provide a "grove
view" of the data.  If you're not using a HyTime engine, then just do what
you would have done anyway.

As I've said in other notes to this group, this should be almost trivial
for TEI locators because they're both designed to address SGML documents
and well documented (and implemented to some degree by at least two
browsers).  This means that defining how TEI locators address groves, SGML
document groves in particular, should be very straight forward, and
adapting the existing facilities to support whatever XML needs shouldn't be
hard (it may already be inherent in those tools' functionality).

Note that HyTime would consider TEI locators to be queries, no different in
nature from any other query language you might want to use.

I am already on record as probably preferring TEI locators as a good syntax
for the XML target audience.  But the use of TEI locators in an
XML-specific, HyTime-derived linking and addressing architecture does not
preclude the use of other HyTime facilities, such as basic name
indirection, treelocs, datalocs, etc.

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, 23 December 1996 16:15:53 UTC