Re: A thought about profiles

On Thu, 2012-07-05 at 15:30 +0100, Henry S. Thompson wrote:
> Liam R E Quin writes:
> 
> > [[
> > An XML document's information set consists of a number of information
> > items; the information set for any well-formed XML document will contain
> > at least a document information item and several others. An information
> > item is an abstract description of some part of an XML document: each
> > information item has a set of associated named properties. In this
> > specification, the property names are shown in square brackets, [thus].
> > The types of information item are listed in section 2.
> >
> > ]]
> >
> > which I think is not entirely compatible with your proposal.

Actually I also quoted,
[[
Its purpose is to provide a consistent set of definitions for use in
other specifications that need to refer to the information in a
well-formed XML document
]]

note also, [[
there is no requirement that the XML Information Set be made available
through a tree structure
]]

Use of "the infoset" to describe the glossary is fine; use of "the
infoset of a document" as short for "the set of XML Information Items
returned by a specific XML parser to an application" is fine. Talking
about "the infoset" as if it were a data model defined by the infoset
spec is going further than I'm comfortable with, as is suggesting that
all XML parsers will/must return the _same_ set of information items for
a given document.

Having said that, maybe the right answer is to update the infoset spec
to reflect that fairly common usage, and if we did that then your more
formal definition could go there. The purpose of the infoset spec is to
provide common definitions for other specs, so if we need a definition
and it's not there, we should put it there.

I think the difficulty I'm having is taking something abstract and
somewhat vague and pinning down specific interpretations, even if those
are/were the intended interpretations. Maybe it's because these days my
head is too far inside XQuery and XSLT and XPath, which are XDM-based.
Construction of an XDM instance is even vaguer than the infoset in some
ways (through necessity) and more precise in others (for interop.).

Sorry for a long answer - it's philosophical and not technical, really. 

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Co-author, Beginning XML, Wrox, July 2012

Received on Thursday, 5 July 2012 18:04:07 UTC