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Leigh, Interesting, when I searched on Google yesterday for some insights into inheritance in XML, the most comprehensive discussion that I came across was from this very list and dated (gasp!) April 1998. Plus ca change... I started reading with a mail from yours truly (http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/xml-dev-Apr-1998/0201.html) and followed the thread down. There's a lot of very detailed commentary about Architectural Forms from people whose knowledge of the topic is orders of magnitude more complete than mine will ever be (God willing :-). I believe that you are correct that AFs can handle the kind of polymorphic behavior that I have been talking about. There are two problems with this: 1) AFs take SGML as gospel and so try to squeeze new features into it with a lot of extremely clever but somewhat arcane hacks, making the whole thing a kludgy and hard to understand. 2) To get the benefit of AFs you need an AF-aware processor, and I'm not aware of such a beast being available to the XML-using masses (but I suspect that someone will enlighten me). Matt > >...I feel that polymorphic behavior of XML documents would > > be an extremely valuable thing. I'd happily justify this > statement if anyone > > is interested, but not in this post since it is already way > too long. > > Isn't polymorphic behaviour from a single XML document actually > Architectural Forms? > > i.e. one can view the document from multiple processing perspectives > by selecting the appropriate architectural form and > associated architectural > processor? > > After the last discussion on AFs, I was left with the conclusion that > one could address some (all?) of the type derivation requirements of > XSD using an Architectural Forms based approach. Or more to put > this another way, that AFs facilitate variations in schemas but still > provide a validatable core. > > Unfortunately I've just not had the time to either fully test > this idea, > or more formally write up that same discussion. > > Cheers, > > L. (lacking in tuits of whatever shape) > > > -- > Leigh Dodds, Research Group, Ingenta | "Pluralitas non est ponenda > http://weblogs.userland.com/eclectic | sine necessitate" > http://www.xml.com/pub/xmldeviant | -- William of Ockham >
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