[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Associating DSSSL style sheets with documents
At 05:14 PM 3/14/97 -0600, Len Bullard wrote: >IOW, what the PIs you suggest do is put metainformation inside >an instance. Why? What is it they will convey that an XML engine >will not already know by reading the specification or could know >by reading a DTD? Well, a DTD, considered as metadata, is pretty thin. It doesn't contain any semantic information, nor much in the way of strong data typing. I can't think of much that is useful for downstream processing that would naturally live inside a DTD. The problem of packaging, of tying the things that you *do* need (stylesheets, topical metadata, typing rules) to documents is a real one and worth spending time on. But there is no reason to believe that a DTD is a very important part of such a solution. Secondly, the distinction between data and metadata is, at a deep level, bogus; totally in the eye of the beholder. For this reason, it is always good and never bad to make what the author may consider metadata available along with what the author considers data. Because the author is usually wrong. >[re PI's:] I'm wondering why they are suddenly a preferred >practice when they were formerly a deprecated practice? What is >worse, a DTD I send once and might be very small, or PIs I send >every time? Reasonable people may disagree. I have no trouble in saying that I think that PIs are a useful thing, and a necessary part of real-world document processing. Thus, yes (gasp) I disagree with the language in the SGML standard deprecating PIs, and I see no reason for us to consider ourselves bound by it. As for once vs. many, I think that it is in general A Good Thing for documents on the web to be self-contained whenever possible. And while I think it is indeed smart to try to avoid retransmitting fixed ancillary files (metadata, stylesheets, whatever), I don't think that this class of files includes DTDs that often for the downstream processing tasks I've seen. - Tim xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@i...)
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