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  • To: 'Gavin Thomas Nicol' <gtn@r...>, xml-dev@l...
  • Subject: RE: There is a meaning, but it's not in the data alone
  • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
  • Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 08:37:30 -0600

Once upon a time, the element did but with a #FIXED value. 
Since that was declared in the DTD, one could assume the 
element didn't have to declare it, but that was before 
well-formed only instances.

What is interesting to me is that there seems to be a 
consensus emerging that AFs are useful and that some 
progress can be made starting from that technology 
toward associating semantics with XML instances. 
It may be a modified design before all is said and 
done, but studying AFs has value toward solving the 
problem.

len


From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@r...]

I understand how it happens of course... my point was that this assumes some form of processor validating the instance, so in fact, the *element* doesn't assert which parents are valid, so much as the {element, parser, DTD(s), and AF processor}. This is what I was reacting to.

I like AF's (I much prefer them to namespaces!!!) in general, and almost always include  a "role" attribute for tying such functionality into the application. That said, given the necessary components for validating that an instance conforms to an architecture, it's usually not *necessary* for the element to declare it's architecture... some other form of annotation can suffice... and I  imagine that schematron, or RNG would probably suffice for validation.

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