Action NW 2003/07/21: Rewrite 3.2.2.3.

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Herewith is my suggested rewrite of Section 3.2.2.3 of the 16 July
editor's draft.

<aside>I've just noticed that the architecture document's ToC is very
selective, containing only those fourth level sections that contain
principles or best practices. Blech. I find that very confusing. It
should, IMHO, contain all or none of the sections at any given
level.</aside>


Composition of Representations
- ------------------------------

Many modern representation formats provide mechanisms for composition.
These mechanisms range from relatively shallow and limited to
relatively deep and sophisticated.

Toward the shallow end of the spectrum, it is possible to embed
textual comments in some image formats, such as JPEG. These comments
are colocated in the representation, but have little or no effect on
the content of the image.

Towards the deep end, it is possible to compose XML documents with
elements from a variety of namespaces. How these namespaces interact
and what effect an element's namespace has on its ancestors, siblings,
and descendents is not always obvious.

Somewhere near the middle of this spectrum, we find container
languages like SOAP which fully expect to be composed from multiple
namespaces but which provide an overall semantic relationship of
message envelope and payload.

These relationships can be mixed and nested arbitrarily. In principle,
a SOAP message could contain a JPEG image that contained an RDF
comment that referenced a vocabulary of terms for describing the
image.

Composition is related to but distinct from the final-form versus
reusable axis described above. For example, one can imagine embedding
SVG in the JPEG image alluded to before, providing a composition of
final-form and reusable components whereas a SOAP envelope might
provide nothing more than a container for a particular payload that
had no presentation form at all.

TAG issue xmlProfiles-29: When, whither and how to profile W3C
specifications in the XML Family?

TAG issue mixedUIXMLNamespace-33: Composability for user
interface-oriented XML namespaces

TAG issue xmlFunctions-34: XML Transformation and composability (e.g.,
XSLT, XInclude, Encryption)

TAG issue RDFinXHTML-35: Syntax and semantics for embedding RDF in

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM    | Few men are so sufficiently discerning to
XML Standards Architect | appreciate all the evil that they do.--La
Web Tech. and Standards | Rochefoucauld
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  | 
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Received on Thursday, 31 July 2003 17:08:59 UTC