Re: Processing instructions

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 12:50 PM, John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> James Clark scripsit:
>
> > a) normal applications, which act on the ESIS
> > b) markup-sensitive applications, which act on the MSIS
>
> I think (a) here can be divided into (a1), the content of the document,
> and (a2), the embedded metadata.  PIs (and the DOCTYPE tag constitute
> the latter.  They are not in the data model but are a bag on the side.
>

I can see this more for PIs in the prolog (where the position of the PI is
not really important). It feels much less natural for PIs in content, where
the position is crucial.

And even if you separate out (a2) from (a1), you still need a data model
for it.  If you put a gun to my head, I could live with PIs with start-tag
syntax in the prolog, and then provide a data model for the content (what
we have now) and a data model for the metadata (ie a list of PIs).


> Well, but a browser is an XML and HTML application, not a MicroXML
> application.  Perhaps (and this would suffice for me) PIs ought to
> be syntactically allowed but not addressed to MicroXML applications,
> only to XML applications that are begin asked to process MicroXML.
> I think that is readily reconcilable with your view of the data model.
>

It doesn't make sense to me to have PIs in the prolog like xml-stylesheet
and say that these are only for markup sensitive applications.

Having PIs in content being for markup sensitive applications (as in
oXygen) makes sense, but I don't think a special syntax is necessary,
because I think such applications could easily adapt to using comments with
some sort of prefix (as in Javadoc and similar things).

James

Received on Thursday, 6 September 2012 07:12:23 UTC