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Re: [good] Question about NS 1.1

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: [good] Question about NS 1.1
• From: "David G. Durand" <david@d...>
• Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 10:57:41 -0400
• In-reply-to: <3CB7849D.4049C69@s...>
• References: <000501c1e213$4a272560$6501a8c0@pcukmka> <3CB6E363.DAC42B0E@s...> <200204121343.OAA01761@p...> <p05101517b8dca1a528e7@[192.168.1.3]> <3CB6FDA2.C6B9B874@s...><p05101519b8dcc9ea9a67@[192.168.1.3]> <3CB7849D.4049C69@s...>

I confess that I'm baffled by your examples. I don't read or write a 
lot of lisp code nowadays, but I the real problem is that you are 
using a lot of functions that are not defined. In several cases you 
give LISP code for what seems like it should be XSLT code, and the 
markup examples don't seem related to the points I was making.

I'm not that interested in exploring at length how XSLT might have 
been different. I just wanted to help to make your argument clearer 
to and to point out some of the reasons that a syntactic focus is 
useful for some applications.

The notational problems may be confusing me, but I don't see the 
place in your response where you address the issue of putting out 
prefixes that are _not_ associated with a namespace, either because 
the object document is intended not to be namespace conformant, or 
because the declarations are expected to be made in another document, 
which will create a parsing context.

For instance, in protocol design (according to Microsoft) there is 
sometimes the need to create session-unique namespaces -- They have 
used relative URIs for this, but one could also late-bind a unique 
URI at transmission time.

I'm also not arguing that this is impossible under your approach, but 
that it involves extra complexity, where as a "syntactic approach" 
takes all of this in stride without special features, but at the cost 
of permitting namespace-related errors in output when one is not 
striving for "special effects".

If you want to make proposals that will be widely considered, you 
probably either need to change your notation to one that is more 
commonly understood, or define it clearly and hope that the people 
you want to communicate with are willing to learn it.

I think I understand where you are coming from, and I've spoken my 
piece, so I am now going to return to my dogmatic slumber. I don't 
think your ideas are bad, just a different tradeoff. Good luck. This 
has certainly helped me think through some issues about type-safety 
and namespaces.

    -- David
-- 
-------------------------------
David Durand                    |  12 Bassett St.
david.durand@i...        |  Providence RI, 02903-4628 USA
VP, Software Architecture       |  401-331-2014 x111 Cell: 401-935-5317
ingenta plc                     |  FAX: 401-331-2015
http://www.ingenta.com/

• References:
  • RE: [good] Question about NS 1.1
    • From: "Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@n...>
  • Re: [good] Question about NS 1.1
    • From: james anderson <james.anderson@s...>
  • Re: [good] Question about NS 1.1
    • From: David Carlisle <davidc@n...>
  • Re: [good] Question about NS 1.1
    • From: "David G. Durand" <david@d...>
  • Re: [good] Question about NS 1.1
    • From: james anderson <james.anderson@s...>
  • Re: [good] Question about NS 1.1
    • From: "David G. Durand" <david@d...>
  • Re: [good] Question about NS 1.1
    • From: james anderson <james.anderson@s...>

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