Re: ICADD support in XML [Was: SGML declaration for XML]

At 12:02 PM 11/11/96 -0500, Murray Altheim wrote:
>
>I've been trying to locate all references to LINK in the corpus of email
>and online documents, so pardon me if this comes in from left field.
>
>As part of the work I'm doing on behalf of ICADD, I'm providing an LPD to
>bridge HTML 3.2 and ICADD 2.2 for people with disabilities. I'd like to
>propose adding support for LINK (specifically IMPLICIT YES) so that the
>same proposed solution for providing ICADD support for the disabled
>community in HTML 3.2 could conceivably work for XML. At some point we may
>want to provide an XML/ICADD LPD along with the XML spec.

I'm not sure it's strictly necessary to include LINK in the XML spec as any
valid XML document can be processed by an SGML parser that supports LINK in
order to generate a new XML instance with the link attributes integrated.

I too would like to see LINK (at least that part of it needed for
associating architectural attributes with elements) in XML, but I think I
would agree that it would cause the spec to far exceed the goals set for
spec size and simplicity.  The use of LINK raises some tricky issues of
application-to-parser communication and entity management that would not be
resolvable in the time we have for XML 1.0.

Note also that the "multiple attribute lists" facility used in
architectural meta-DTDs and almost certainly to be included in SGML97 (and,
I would presume, immediately adopted by XML), will provide almost the same
facility for adding attributes to elements unilaterally that LINK provides
today.

In other words, with the new syntax, you could so this:

<!DOCTYPE MyXMLDoc SYSTEM "http://www.drmacro.com/dtds/myxmldoc.dtd" [
 <!ATTLIST Div   ICADD  NAME #FIXED "heading" >
  ...
]>

These attribute declarations could be in an external parameter entity.

Note that would you would *NOT* get would be the ability to apply different
attributes to the same element type based on hierarchy, which you can do
quite effectively with LINK.  

Cheers,

E.
--
W. Eliot Kimber (eliot@isogen.com) 
Senior SGML Consulting Engineer, Highland Consulting
2200 North Lamar Street, Suite 230, Dallas, Texas 75202
+1-214-953-0004 +1-214-953-3152 fax
http://www.isogen.com (work) http://www.drmacro.com (home)
"Rats in the morning, rats in the afternoon...if they don't go away, I'll be
re-educated soon..."                 --Austin Lounge Lizards, "1984 Blues"

Received on Monday, 11 November 1996 12:42:33 UTC