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Re: dynamic elements

• To: James William Pye <flaw@r...>
• Subject: Re: dynamic elements
• From: Liam Quin <liam@w...>
• Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 14:44:41 -0400
• Cc: XML-Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <1098727430.728.2761.camel@localhost>
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On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 11:03:51AM -0700, James William Pye wrote:
[...]

>  <char:amp/>
>  <char:lt/>
>  <!--
>   This works out nicely, I think. It provides entity functionality with
>   namespaces, which I find quite attractive, and very interesting.
>   !-->
> </xml>

As you note, you can already do this in XInclude.
It doesn't work in attribute values, though --

href="http://&content-server;/&docroot;/Introduction"

This sort of approach (using element syntax for replaceable
content) has been discussed before, and has been deployed in
environments ranging from semiconductor data sheets to
transcriptions of historical texts.

If it hasn't caught on everywhere, I think it's largely
because of problems with attribute values.

You are more likely to want
    <constant name="amp" />
or
    <constant name="companyName" />
in practice -- i.e. not just a character, and perhaps even containing
embedded markup.

But then you sometimes want to strip out the markup, so you end
up with multiple defintions or with something like
    <constant name="companyName" format="plain" />

The contribution of namespaces here is perhaps that schema writers could
incorporate the namespace more easily, although it also may make life
harder for DtD writers.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/

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