[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] A thought on XLink in PIs for processing directives
While tinkering with XLink and RDDL, I had an idea that I thought I'd toss out on this list. I'd be interested to know if there have been similar proposals in the past. A number of specs put forward specialized mechanisms for associating external resources with a document for a specific purpose. For example, XML Schema gives us the "xsi:schemaLocation" attribute, XML Catalog gives us the "oasis-xml-catalog" PI, and for associating stylesheets, we have the "xml-stylesheet" PI. It seems like these could be unified into one generalized mechanism by building upon XLink and RDDL constructs. You couldn't use XLink syntax directly since these examples all must be declared before the document element or on the document element itself. But it seems to me that one could designate a generalized PI that mimics XLink simple links that could achieve the desired result. For example, the attribute "xsi:schemaLocation='http://foo/bar foobar.xsd http://yadda/yadda yadda.xsd'" could become: <?xml-link role="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" arcrole="http://foo/bar" href="foobar.xsd"?> <?xml-link role="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" arcrole="http://yadda/yadda" href="yadda.xsd"?> The PI <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="style.css"?> could become: <?xml-link role="http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/css" href="style.css"?> The PI <?oasis-xml-catalog catalog="http://example.com/catalog.xml"?> could become: <?xml-link role="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog" href="http://example.com/catalog.xml"?> This seems to me better than the current situation for the following reasons: * Provides a consistent, extensible mechanism for these sorts of processing directives. * Leverages namespaces and URIs for identifying the intent and purpose of a directive. * Does not clutter up the document's infoset with processing directives as attributes do. Is this a reasonable idea or am I off my rocker on this? Have there been similar such proposals?
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