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Re: Vocabulary Combination

• To: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>
• Subject: Re: Vocabulary Combination
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 14:33:23 -0700
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <c9rcdvos4rkru5l9eg2rgu7ohiulif4fd9@4...>
• References: <ab7bdvs3gol4j4trlefsiq6g4bfbaou70f@4...> <3ED5C2E7.4060805@p...> <gbjcdv80mdhn78c8egd27ltqmndcf64kin@4...> <3ED65B5E.6020600@p...> <c9rcdvos4rkru5l9eg2rgu7ohiulif4fd9@4...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312

Arjun Ray wrote:

> Correct.  The spec is silent on this, and thus useless for the general
> problem of vocabulary combination *by syntax*.

Arjun is really getting close to troll territory here, but this very 
strong claim should not go unrefuted.  The syntactic problems of 
combining markup from multiple vocabularies include:

1. avoiding collisions
2. expressing syntactic restrictions on the markup from each
    individual vocabulary
3. expressing syntactic restrictions on the way the vocabularies
    combine
4. (maybe) expressing rules for how to extract vocabulary-specific
    subsets of the combination.  But this is maybe getting into
    semantic territory.

#1 is easy, and namespaces solve it.  That's all they've ever done, and 
all they've ever been claimed to do.

#2 is harder, and is addressed, if not completely solved, by DTDs and 
their successors.

#3 is harder still, and is addressed, if not completely solved, by more
more modern schema languages like XSD and RNG.

#4... nope, I think that's a semantic ingegration problem.

Put another way, there are states intermediate between being "useless" 
and "providing a complete solution".  It's a good thing, because 
software or standards that achieve the second criterion are not observed 
to exist.

  -Tim

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Vocabulary Combination
    • From: MURATA Makoto <murata@h...>
  • Re: Vocabulary Combination
    • From: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>

• References:
  • Vocabulary Combination
    • From: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>
  • Re: Vocabulary Combination
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
  • Re: Vocabulary Combination
    • From: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>
  • Re: Vocabulary Combination
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
  • Re: Vocabulary Combination
    • From: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>

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