Re: clink/ilink direction (Was: anchor awareness)

 David G. Durand wrote: 
> 
>     A "grove" is just a new name for what everyone else in the world calls
> a "parse tree". Now we could avoid parse trees by using byte offsets, but
> given that addressing bytes in markup does not usually make sense, we will
> need to have the parse tree anyway -- that's what structural addressing is
> founded on. As far as I can tell, the details of groves are irrelevant to
> XML, unless we decide that we have to explain how XML linking can be
> treated as HyTime linking. I think this is a fine idea, but a relatively
> low priority, as HyTime implementations are a micro-niche even within the
> SGML community.
> 

I would say that some kind of grove specification is essential to XML.  The 
grove defines what is important from that markup scheme and what relationships
exist within the document.  It levels the playing field for applications and
insures that they "get it right"!  HyTime or not, we should define a
subset of the DSSSL/HyTime groves for XML's use.

As I understand it, groves will be making their way back into the SGML standard
in its revision.

Groves are not irrelevant--they are quite the opposite and extremely important.

If we do this now, we will find it extremely useful to extend what XML and
XML applications can do in the future.

==============================================================================
R. Alexander Milowski     http://www.copsol.com/   alex@copsol.com
Copernican Solutions Incorporated                  (612) 379 - 3608

Received on Sunday, 29 December 1996 11:01:21 UTC