RE: !BEHAVIOR

David Durand wrote
"Sounds like a great idea for a set of architectural forms that might be
used by people with similar problems."


I believe there is much to be gained from a stylesheet syntax which uses
architectural forms in a big way.

Anyone else feel this?

I've recently been named joint project leader (with Nigel Shaw of
EuroSTEP) in an ISO Preliminary Work Item (under ISO TC184/SC4 -
Industrial Data) to look into how SGML and STEP can interoperate.

I have from time to time mentioned STEP in my submissions to this forum,
and on occasions such as the XML workshop at WWW6 in Santa Clara. There
were also presentations on STEP/SGML at SGML Europe 97 in Barcelona.

One of the areas I want to look at very seriously is how architectural
forms can be used to provide different views of data. The core storage
might be highly data-centric, but document-centric, GUI-centric and
other-centric views will also be needed. It seems to me that AFs  can be
a powerful way of achieving this. It seems to me that an architecture (a
coherent set of architectural forms) might provide just what is needed -
a means of defining a particular subset of the data, presented in a
particular way, with particular semantics and behaviour. In short, a
rich stylesheet++ or the kind we need.

When does work on XML-STYLE begin? I can't wait.

Daniel

Daniel Rivers-Moore
Technical Director, RivCom
Lotmead Business Village, Swindon SN4 0UY, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1793 790802 Fax: +44 (0)1793 790812
daniel.rivers-moore@rivcom.com

(BTW, I think the passage quoted below is from Martin Bryan in response
to Andrew Layman - not from Andrew himself)

	-----Original Message-----
	From:	dgd@cs.bu.edu [SMTP:dgd@cs.bu.edu]
	Sent:	Thursday, June 12, 1997 3:15 AM
	To:	w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
	Subject:	RE: !BEHAVIOR

	>At 10:39 11/6/97 -0700, Andrew Layman wrote:
	>The example that was being discussed, <date>19960527</date>,
clearly showed
	>that what is important is knowing what something is. Unless you
understand
	>the notation used for this date you cannot interpret it. As I
said in my
	>earlier messages, as we cannot use notation for XML elements,
and we do not
	>have access to the lexical typing mechanism provided in the
SGML Extended
	>Facilities Annex, we need some way to distinguish between the
following
	>valid dates:
	>
	><date country=US>01022001</date>
	><date country=UK>01022001</date> (30 days later!)
	><date country=Isreal culture=Hebrew>20010101</date> (This isn't
even in the
	>same millenium!)
	><date country=Isreal culture=Arabic>10022010</date>(This  isn't
the same as
	>any of the other dates.)

	In tradtional SGML, we use attributes and depend on applications
to
	interpret them. We don't have a standard way to do this (which
means that
	you may have to write date-checking code to verify your
conforming SGML
	documents).

	Leaving things like this is _not_ a showstopper flaw. Most
stylesheets need
	not know the data type of element contents, and most
applications that do
	will require much more structure than a single element, and will
use the
	doctype anyway (though they may have the DTD (and other data
formats)
	compiled in).

	><date>01022001</date> is clearly not sufficient to undertand
the contents.
	>You need some qualifier (as I have been forced to do with
application
	>specific attributes in the preceding examples).

	And it's not something that we desperately need, but something
that we
	would like for some applications.

	>There are many other cases where you need to invoke some
outside interpreter
	>to be able to understand what an element represents.
	exactly, and currently it's a processing decision -- if you're
not doing
	_any_ procressing, then syntactic restrictions on the values
don't really
	matter.

	>Either you need a
	>notation processor as per SGML or you need some other
indirectable mechanism
	>for identifying how to interpret the data.
	stylesheet.

	>What I was suggesting was that
	>this should be done with a standardized attribute, which I
called behaviour
	>for want of a better name. I do not believe this is about
presentation, it
	>is about being able to make sense of the data when it is not in
the same
	>textual format as the rest of the document. Its about
understanding what
	>something actually is.

	Sounds like a great idea for a set of architectural forms that
might be
	used by people with similar problems.

	   -- 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 Thursday, 12 June 1997 05:25:00 UTC