Cart
|
[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: CSS syntax for RDF
 Hi Micah, Looking in my notes and what I learned about meta information in the last .... years it appears, at least in my humble opinion, that XMLification mixed with object inheritance leads to some cool and practical side effects. For instance, we can say that most of the topic or concept relationships are based on the notion of set. A topic being a set of resource or, said differently, that a set of resources can be categorized under a particular topic. To build these topic sets, the first concept that comes to my mind is the concept of links or one-to-many links. Also, since a topic can be associated to a set of properties, then the concept of record ( a la RDBM - or schema based records) or the concept of frame (free form record or without a fix schema) comes to my mind. Playing since already several years with xlinks I found cool and practical the notion that an element could be used to encode a particular concept/object and inherit the behavior of a link and thus also encode the notion of linkage of of some relationhip with external objects. Simple enough to do in the case of xlink since the element becomes a link or becomes of type "link" with an xlink:type attribute. Then the element being a serialized or encoded view of my object/concept _is_a_ link and therefore inherits the characteristics of a link. Did you know that the concept of property inheritance seems to be innate to our human brain? Pursuing this thread, I also found cool and practical to be able to inherit the frame capacities of RDF. Let's pretend for a moment that it would be like xlink and that by declaring rdf:type="description" my element becomes an rdf like element. Thus, my element is now inheriting from xlink characteristics and rdf characteristics and therefore is_a link and is_a RDF frame. Playing with this idea (not a new one just one outside of the "official XML orthodoxy"), I found that I obtained the following gains: - Being able to re-use stylesheets designed for generic xlink or RDF+ (let's call it that way since I have no names for it). - Being able to perform client side transformations and thus reducing the work load imposed on the server. Moreover, to be able to really do some process partitioning and fulfill the promises of distributed processing architectures. Thanks god, maybe we'll move out of the mainframe mind set again. You know it is tough having lived though a mainframe mindset two times in a life span. The central bureau concept (my own appreciation of the mainframe mindset :-) reminds me of Nietzsche's eternal return. (have you noticed that the number of browsers able to perform client side XSLT transformation significantly increased in the last year?) In fact implementing MCF project X with today's XML technologies is a lot easier. The limitations now are more in the minds than in the tools :-) Having said all that (sorry if I was verbose but you seemed to have wake up some forgotten thoughts :-) Micah I have a question for you. Having a CSS based frame system or RDF like if you prefer has the inherent disadvantage that no tools are available for rendition. So to speak to transform the frames into something appearing in my browser. Have you anything in mind about this issue? You know, with MCF we had the disadvantage of having to write our own viewers/parsers. 
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! 
Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|
|||||||||
