Re: PIs considered harmful Was: XML-SW, a thought experiment

Paul Prescod wrote:

> I have large-scale applications that depend on processing instructions.
> The most recent is a commercially shipping product for a W3C member
> company. To protect their privacy I'll mention instead a member that
> makes heavy use of PIs that is not currently a customer, SoftQuad. They
> use processing instructions to indicate where the current user's "caret"
> is in the document, regardless of what schema, schema language,
> vocabulary or DTD is in use. They also use it to point from the document
> to the relevant stylesheet, as recommended by the W3C. 

My company also has a system that uses PIs to memo-ize various
editor and applications settings for a document. In the absense of
any way to bundle this with a document for sending between
platforms, or making settings data available over the WWW, 
inline markup using PIs is very useful.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

P.S. By the way, on the general subject of what PIs are good for,
and without wishing to start any kind of discussion, another 
good reason for namespace declarations to be attributes and
not PIs occurred to me recently (the other one that has
originally convinced me was that PIs have a notional point
operation, while attributes have a notional element scoping):

If we say that a document should have integrity even if
all PIs are removed, then a PI for namespace declarations
must be inappropriate.

Received on Thursday, 14 February 2002 08:53:00 UTC