Re: First thoughts about infoset elaboration

Thanks for starting this off, Henry.  In the next day or so I hope to send 
some thoughts on where I think this fits into the bigger picture, but for 
now let me just comment on one more isolated concern.  Specifically, I'm 
not happy with the notion of "Elaborating Namespaces" as opposed to, 
perhaps, "Elaborating Elements" or "Elaborating Element Tags".   Would the 
discussion be interestingly different if, instead of 

        <xi:include xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">

we had:

        <xml:include>?

In other words, would we tell a very different story if the Core WG had 
decided to put the include element in the xml: namespace instead of in a 
new one? 

Various communities seem to keep drifting toward assuming that namespaces 
in general have semantics like this, and I'm very unhappy with that.  I 
certainly don't think we should preclude particular namespaces being 
documented as having only the names of elements that have certain 
particular semantics (e.g. they're all elborating, in the sense you use 
the term), but that's a special case.  In general, for an XML Functions 
analysis, it's the individual elements, named by expanded names, that 
should have particular semantics, and there should be no need for all the 
elements in a given namespace to have similar semantics.

Indeed, even before we get to ealborating elements like <xi:include>, or 
quoting elements, the XML Functions analysis has to tell a story about the 
semantics of the root element of a document, and recursively down from 
there.   Again, I think it's elements not namespaces that should be the 
focus.  So, for example, I think it's more useful to talk about the 
semantics of "an XML document which has as its root <h:html 
xmlns:h='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>" than it is to talk about "the 
semantics of documents from the XHTML namespace.

Noah

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------








ht@inf.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson)
Sent by: www-tag-request@w3.org
01/30/2007 12:37 PM
 
        To:     www-tag@w3.org
        cc:     (bcc: Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM)
        Subject:        First thoughts about infoset elaboration



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Further to our discussion in Cambridge [1] and the action I took [2]
I've produced a thought piece on what a definition of our idea of
'elaborated infoset' might look like:

  http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/elabInfoset.html

Comments welcome,

ht

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2006/12/11-minutes#item07
[2] http://www.w3.org/2006/12/11-tagmem-minutes.html#action06
- -- 
 Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of 
Edinburgh
                     Half-time member of W3C Team
    2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
            Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                   URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
[mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged 
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Received on Tuesday, 13 February 2007 21:11:25 UTC