[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Document Feature Requirements [was: Common XML ...]

• From: "Michael Champion" <Mike.Champion@s...>
• To: "XML-Dev Mailing list" <xml-dev@x...>
• Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2000 09:41:49 -0400

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steven Rowe" <sarowe@t...>
To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
Cc: "XML-Dev Mailing list" <xml-dev@x...>
Sent: Saturday, April 08, 2000 1:09 AM
Subject: Document Feature Requirements [was: Common XML ...]


> Is it not ironic that Common XML, an attempt to increase interoperability,
> excludes PIs, which are likely to be the mechanism which will be proposed
> to express document feature requirements, another attempt to increase
> interoperability.


To be pedantic, specifying that everyone should understand a small set of
objects encoded in PI syntax (the XFM along with the stylesheet binding and
the XML declaration that's not REALLY a PI) is a far cry from recommending
that one can safely use PI's willy-nilly.

Nevertheless, the irony has not been lost on the SML-DEV list!  Actually,
the very reasons that PIs are excluded from the current draft of Common XML
is very apropos to the discussion of their potential use in the Feature
Manifest:

1 - the W3C discourages them
2 - Many products don't round-trip them
3 - There is no generally used mechanism signifying how they are used

But they *are* good for quick hacks that a user community could agree on,
since most modern tools will more or less handle them gracefully, and a
PI-based solution would not require DTD/schema changes. In the long run we
need a clean solution, but if XML-DEV can come up with a set of conventions
that producers and consumers of XML can agree to informally support, we can
quickly address the problems that Peter Murray-Rust has raised.



***************************************************************************
This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers.
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev
List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
***************************************************************************

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: Document Feature Requirements [was: Common XML ...]
    • From: "Don Park" <donpark@d...>

• References:
  • Common XML in one piece
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
  • Document Feature Requirements [was: Common XML ...]
    • From: Steven Rowe <sarowe@t...>

• Prev by Date: Re: SCHEMA: length for binary datatypes
• Next by Date: Re: Document Feature Requirements [was: Common XML ...]
• Previous by thread: Document Feature Requirements [was: Common XML ...]
• Next by thread: RE: Document Feature Requirements [was: Common XML ...]
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread