Re: First thoughts about infoset elaboration

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Pat Hayes writes:

> HST wrote:
>>However, the fact that you ask the question suggests you may have some
>>precedent in mind?
>
> Well, not really. But it is instructive that you use the LISP
> analogy. I guess my question arose from asking myself whether
> elaboration really *is* like LISP evaluation, or more generally like
> an interpreter action: or whether it is better seen as a syntactic
> mapping between surface forms. Because if the latter, then there
> really isn't any reason why elaboration should strip off a quote, is
> there? But then I thought, but its obviously useful to strip a quote
> in some cases... and if you don't like it, you can always
> multiple-quote... and then I thought, but what if you don't know how
> many elaborations are going to get done to it? (Like the old joke
> about the Thames) and you just wanted to keep this chunk of XML
> protected from any number of elaborations... and that's why I asked
> the question. So now you have full disclosure, and its still a
> question :-)

So it's more like macro expansion than either full evaluation or
desugarring, I guess.  The idea (well, _one_ idea) is that the
elaborated infoset is what directly carries the semantics the author
had in mind -- things such as XInclude, signatures and encryption are
just packaging artefacts.  As such the 99% case is covered by no
protection at all, and 99% of the remaining 1% is covered by one layer
of protection.

But I agree that in case what I _really_ want to convey is a document
which includes, on the document element, an eq:quote attribute, the
current proposal gives me no way to accomplish this.  Supporting an
eq:quote _element_, on the other hand, would do the job, since

<eq:quote>
 <eq:quote>...</eq:quote>
</eq:quote>

will elaborate to

 <eq:quote>...</eq:quote>

Still no help there for protection against multiple elaborations, but
_that_ really does seem like a vanishingly small set of use cases. . .

ht
- -- 
 Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
                     Half-time member of W3C Team
    2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
            Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                   URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
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Received on Tuesday, 30 January 2007 19:12:29 UTC