Re: Architectural problems of the XInclude CR

On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 08:13:36AM -0500, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> which is not as far I can see explained.   The fact is that XIncldue
> operates
> at he syntactic level, and (in parse-xml mode) can only incldue XML syntax.

  XInclude does not operate at the syntactic level. It operates
on the result Infoset if available after successful parsing which is
yet another level.

> So if the document is actually served as for example SVG, that should matter
> in my opinion - the XInclude just operates on the syntax.

  SVG, XHTML, etc ... all those resources based on XML should be
usable for XInclude operations, the operation is an inclusion, not
a transclusion. Using XInclude syntax carries the author intent to
operate at that level, otherwise they would use an external unparsed
entity.

> Clearly a warning about content negotiation should be used - because
> XInclude  operates at the syntactic, not functional, level, there is no way
> that
> a content negoatiated resource should be used.  They are if you like
> features you
> just don't use together.

  Agreed.

> If one wanted a way of giving a hint to an application as to the mime type
> of a file,
> then that should be tackled as a separate problem - for use anywhere.

  the problem shows up even for resources referenced using HTTP
1/ the resource may be cached in a catalog and the catalog won't deliver 
   a Mime-Type
2/ a lot of XML resources won't be served with text/xml or application/xml
   while they are perfectly suitable for XInclude processing as XML
   resources.

> I agree that "When the resource is coerced to text/xml, the fragment part of
> the URI reference is interpreted as an XPointer, regardless of the media
> type of the resource" seems a direct
> breaking of the architecture, and also a possible huge bug.

I don't see how this "break the architecture", it would break a transclusion
processing intended for rendering, it is not the case for such processing.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard@redhat.com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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Received on Wednesday, 22 January 2003 13:50:19 UTC