Re: Linking to stylesheets in XML

At 12:02 AM -0700 4/19/97, Jon Bosak wrote:

>Requirements are the best place to begin; these occur to me:
>
>People should state other requirements if they can think of any.

7. It shall be at least _possible_ to attach a stylesheet to a document
without changing the entity containing that document.

>Here are some mechanisms for associating stylesheets with documents
>that have been proposed by various people.

Method 4:
Indirect off some common "hub" document. This might use links and some king
of "BOS" a la HyTime, or more simply, use the MIME-SGML/CATALOG approach.
On the WWW the default destination of a link/XML URL would be a CATALOG
file specifying the DOCUMENT to parse, the additional stylesheets usable
(first one used by default?), and any oher CATALOGs required to process the
file (to allow reasonable CATALOG management).

This allows the meeting of requirement 7 -- Which is the real point of
separate stylesheets, anyway, isn't it? And also makes progressive display
easier, since a single HTTP 1.1 connection can effectively fetch the
stylesheet before the document (if it's not already cached), thus allowing
the document to be rendered as received.

Needless to say, I think that my requirement is fundamental, and the
proposed solution seems better to me than the others, as the others simply
don't meet the requirement.

  -- David

_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW                    \__________________________

Received on Monday, 21 April 1997 14:22:19 UTC