Re: Ephemeral XML?

At 11:19 AM 1/13/97 -0500, Dave Durand wrote:

>   The points about form and applet semantics are very good, however. We
>must not forget that these must fit into our stylesheet language somehow.
>But we should stay away from namespace pollution, if we can possibly manage
>it, though.

I don't consider my proposal to be "namespace pollution." I consider it to
be method over-riding, in the manner of object-oriented programming. The
HTML "tags" I mentioned - FORM, APPLET, SCRIPT, OBJECT - are much closer
conceptually to method invocations that they are to "conventional" SGML
elements. I don't believe their behavior can be defined in a stylesheet -
unless the stylesheet has a string saying, in effect, "Default: HTML." 

One solution is to define these tags as architecural forms, and make these
architectural forms part of a default set that's used by XML. The limitation
in using architectural forms is that they only allow behavior to be
expressed as "conventional comments." (SMSL is supposed address this, but
SMSL isn't here yet).

Pre-defined interfaces with over-rideable methods are what make component
software work. Call these "component DTDs." 


Regards,

Ralph E. Ferris
Project Manager, Electronic Publications
Fujitsu Software Corporation

Received on Monday, 13 January 1997 13:17:49 UTC