Re: stylesheet PI

Le ven 13/02/2004 à 18:01, Jeremy Carroll a écrit :
> I am not very up on GRDDL but get the impression that you are not using the 
> stylesheet PI, despite it having been explicit created to give an XML 
> mechanism corresponding to the HTML link attribute ....

It is in fact a mechanism corresponding to the HTML link element, when
used in a context of a style sheet, not the general recommended linking
mechanism; in particular, it seems suited for browsers to display (or
read vocally, ...) a generic XML document, not to help interpreting its
meaning.

The generic XML linking mechanism is XLink; it might be a good idea to
try to rely on XLink for GRDDL, but the currently poor support of XLink
in XML tools and the very basic types of linking needed for GRDDL
doesn't add up very much in favor of that.

> As is, any XML format wanting to use the grddl attribute has to explicitly 
> permit it, whereas PIs can be added to any format.

IMHO, PI are really a not very good way to store information in the XML
infoset, given that they cannot be parsed generally speaking (ie, they
don't have a notion of attribute, sub-elements, etc.); as far as I
remember, James Clark regrets nowadays to have used processing
instructions for the styling mechanism in XML, and many people argue in
favor of deprecating them in an upcoming version of XML; in short, I
don't think it would be reasonable to build an XML application targeted
for wide interoperability based on processing instructions (again,
that's only my opinion)

I agree that the fact that GRDDL creates a new attribute in a new
namespace using a new mechanism is suboptimal; but on the bright side,
the namespace-based mechanism [1] is much more powerful and relies on
the widely-deployed and understood namespace mechanism.

Maybe only the latter will get implemented and deployed; but
document-based semantics still seems like an interesting application of
GRDDL, I would think.

1. http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec#ns-bind

Dom
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Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
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