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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Elements vs. attributes was: Are people really usi ng Ide
Len,
You did indeed get the address idea right. CAM allows you to customize the
layouts and tags to the local community - while retaining references to the
global dictionary definitions. This is much cleaner than namespaces BTW.
The UPU has this use case. In the CAM tutorial we show different address
formats - US street, US APO, and Canadian - all co-existing in the same
template. This is immensely useful for international mail authorities trying
to automate address data exchanges between systems.
OASIS CIQ has also defined this uber-dictionary approach.
This also touches on versioning - you can have the one template handle versions
too. And you can version at the element and attribute level - this is vital.
Everyone thinks of versioning at the schema level - but in reality you need
versioning down atomically within the schema. CAM fully supports versioning at
that level, and also using registry to augment that.
One other thing - versioning of CAM engine itself - and compliance checking
levels support by engine - yes - we do both.
BTW - another great benefit of CAM is that it is agnostic to the element /
attribute thing - you can treat them interchangably - and define rules and
semantics freely against - no restrictions - (caveat: within limits of
wellformness rules for XML).
So - in summary -
o substitution sub-structures - check
o decoupling of tagnames to semantic meaning - check
o semantic referencing without need for namespaces - check
o versioning - structure and atomic levels - check
o registry supported versioning - check
o link from structure and rules to CAM version / level - check
o agnostic element and attribute handling - check
o Form level processing - (I noticed you sidetracked into this!) - no - we do
not do what XForms and XFA is designed to do et al - but we can generate form
markup given a form template - that's just rendering, nothing else.
Cheers, DW.
======================================
Quoting "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>:
But the flexibility of XML is that it can be heterogenous. . . and how to
understand when you will get what structure is the purpose of attributes. .
. so the more context sensitive XML modeler (who understands the
requirements first) might use:
<address country="us">
<street />
<city />
<state />
<zipCode />
</address>
for US address, and the the following for UK addresses:
<address country="uk">
<buildingName />
<street />
<city />
<postalCode />
</address>
I am not aware of a way to use Schema to enforce a substructure based on a
value in an attribute, but from the short look at CAM that I have done, this
seems to be exactly what it was designed to do. . . combine snippets of
variants together into a complete document that is very context aware.
David, did I get that right?
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