Re: Pragma Proposal ready for review

The degree to which we define semantic content was probably the most contentious part of the proposal, but we did at least agree that each pragma should have a name, so that a pragmatic parser knew whether or not the pragma was one which it understood.

I think if we are giving pragma names, we ought to consider namespace collision, and if we are doing so, an implementation for XML namespaces also made sense.  Of course, an implementation of XML namespaces in iXML does not need to be done using pragma, but I can't see how it harms us to use pragma for optional standardised features as well as non-standardised extensions, and the proposal seemed incomplete without at least a suggestion on how to declare namespaces.

Also, if we have pragma in our non-xml representation, we have to at least agree what those pragma should look like in an XML representation of a grammar.  Non-pragmatic processors still don't have to understand pragma, but should be able to preserve them across representations.

_________________
Tomos Hillman
eXpertML Ltd
+44 7793 242058
On 14 Dec 2021, 11:18 +0000, Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>, wrote:
> I'm not sure quite how to say this, but this proposal shocked me, because it is not at all what I thought we had agreed we were doing.
>
> I was expecting a proposal for a syntax to communicate with implementations, that further had no defined semantic content; something that allows things along the lines of
>
>    {! ignore ambiguity}
>    {! serialize all parses}
>    {! serialize to json}
>
> (though without specifying the "ignore ambiguity" bits, which would be specified by implementations).
>
> Any other issue, particular semantic ones, such as namespaces, text insertion and so on, are separate use cases, that need to be discussed separately, but have absolutely no place in pragmas, because pragmas are exactly about things that are not standardised.
>
> Steven
>
> On Tuesday 07 December 2021 18:15:43 (+01:00), Tom Hillman wrote:
>
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > The proposal for pragma that Michael and I have been working on for some weeks is now ready for review in advance of our meeting next week:
> >
> > https://github.com/invisibleXML/ixml/pull/10
> >
> > Our hope is that this will give us a clear idea of which minimal features of pragma would need to be supported for a 1.0 release of iXML so that
> >
> > 1. Pragma implementers will be able to do something useful with them in the future,
> > 2. non-pragma supporting processors know enough to know what they can ignore for "fallback" behaviours.
> >
> > To that end, the proposal details
> >
> > • Identified Requirements and Desiderata
> > • A proposed syntax
> > • Several use cases with worked examples
> > • Suggested updates to the iXML grammar
> >
> > Our hope is that we can make a decision on whether or not we include any pragma considerations for a release at XML Prague, if we decide that such a release is a goal of the group; if we do decide to do both of those things, I would like to (co-)write a paper as part of making a noise for release.
> >
> > Next week's meeting is shaping up to be quite busy, so if folk could possibly take a look in advance, it might save us some precious time on the day!
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Tom
> >
> > _________________
> > Tomos Hillman
> > eXpertML Ltd
> > +44 7793 242058