RE: one thing we forgot

In the following I assume we do *not* differentiate dialects by pointing
from instance documents to the locations where their schemas are defined
(via xsi:schemaLocation, xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation, or similar:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xmlschema11-1-20060831/#xsi_schemaLocation
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xmlschema11-1-20060831/#schema-loc).

What about having an ***optional*** attribute, dialect, on <Document>?
It optionally specifies the dialect the sender intends this Document to
be validated against. The receiver is still free to reuse the Document
in
novel dialects by trying to analyze its syntactic features. When
omitted,
the receiver *must* do such analysis or 'trial-and-error validation'.
We could even make the optional dialect attribute "At Risk". As we
heard,
introducing such a new feature after LC seems to be more painful.

Isn't the official set of names, {BLD, DTB, PRD, ...}, of collections of
those features (Standard Extensions), and their intended use, something
RIF has to carefully keep track of anyway?

-- Harold


-----Original Message-----
From: public-rif-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-rif-wg-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Sandro Hawke
Sent: July 5, 2008 2:53 AM
To: Michael Kifer
Cc: RIF WG
Subject: Re: one thing we forgot 



> There is nothing in the current XML or presentation syntax that
> identifies a document as belonging to a particular dialect, like BLD
or PRD.
> Without this it is not clear how an external application will know
what to
> do with a set of rules found somewhere out there. I think this calls
for a
> mandatory attribute for the document tag. Can also be done with a
mandatory
> meta annotation, but I think this is important enough to be part of
the synta
> x.

I don't think this was forgotten.  Every time it's come up, so far, I've
successfully argued against including this kind of thing, because of how
it interacts with forward and backward compatibility.  I think it's
better to simply recognize the syntactic features you need to recognize,
instead of also needing to understand the names of collections of those
features.

    -- Sandro

Received on Saturday, 5 July 2008 15:16:29 UTC