Re: Comments on "An Invisible XML Modularity Proposal"

On Tuesday 07 July 2026 14:56:11 (+02:00), Graydon Saunders wrote:


On Tue, Jul 7, 2026, at 08:43, Norm Tovey-Walsh wrote:
Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl <mailto:steven.pemberton@cwi.nl> > writes:

> 1.2 INCLUDE
>
> I went through literally dozens of possible keywords for "use" and
> "share" before settling on them. In particular I rejected "include"
> because of its similarity to the one used in the C preprocessor. In
> ixml modularisation the semantics are very different to those of C's
> #include, and therefore could lead to misunderstanding.


The semantics of “include” vary across languages: the C preprocessor, XML Schema, RELAX NG, XSLT, all have includes of one form or another.
It’s not going to be confusing.



As an habitually lightly dazed user of ixml, I would like to chime in here in support of Norm's position.


"include" isn't a specific behavior and it isn't even a general class of semantics; it's a concept, "use stuff from over there". How that happens is expected to be language-specific. (e.g., Schematron, where the concept gets split into "include" and "extend".)


Ha ha, and to explain it you use "use"! "use" clearly a better choice then ;-)


Stevem







Graydon
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Graydon Saunders  | graydonish@fastmail.com <mailto:graydonish@fastmail.com>
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