[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] role, arcrole, purpose, nature
I just now got around to reading the rather good discussion of this stuff as related to RDDL. In particular the discussion about "purpose" and "nature". The fact that XLink happens to provide two different role attributes seems to map nicely onto this, and having closely reread what the XLink draft says, the language is fortunately loose enough that we could assign these things either way I think without doing violence to the spirit of XLink. I could live with either way of doing it. I'd argue for using role= for "purpose" and arcrole="nature", just because I think that in this type of application, purpose is more important than nature. For example, I'm trying to think of application scenarios where I'd charge off and run a schema over some instance when the only knowledge that I have is that it's a schema. I just can't see it; for all I know this is a schema that provides heavy type-checking of <xyz> element content and skips lightly over everything else. Same comment for CSS stylesheets, DTDs, java classes, you name it. At the end of the day I have never bought into the idea that a vocabulary must have a special "definitive" or "canonical" schema; maybe I'm in a minority here. I still think the idea of having a rddl.org/arcroles.html resource is a really good one, except we might want to call it natures.html. Even if any sensible person can see what the identifier for XSD files has to be, it's a good idea to have that written down somewhere. And there are lots of others where the identifer is just going to be somewhat arbitrary, or even where it's not arbitrary but also not obvious. Once we define a minimal RDDL on this basis, the next interesting question is: can we say anything definitive about a canonical list of "purpose" values? While this sounds like something that could escalate into a huge task, I can think of lots of things that would be nice to be able to specify: - schema designed to support authoring applications - stylesheet designed for browser X version Y and browser Z version W - processor that makes RTF - executable code that performs spell-checking Note that all the above "purpose" could orthogonally be combined with the "nature" values. Hey Jonathan, waiting for the next RDDL draft reflecting all this useful discussion. Or is it there now? -Tim
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