[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Architectural Forms revival?
Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...> wrote: | My main problem with [the AF approach] has always been that it involves | processing that is not available to XML generically. [...] the best | solution to this whole matter [might] have been to hypnotize the XML 1.0 | folks to add into XML 1.0 the ability to [re-map] elements and attributes. XML 1.0 was essentially a baby-vs-bathwater exercise with ISO 8879. It was also (in the minds of at least a few) a "first cut" effort, it being known that outstanding problems with ISO 8879 would have to wait for at least the (then as yet forthcoming) WebSGML TC. [To name just two issues out of the many which in the event got deferred indefinitely: integration of AFs and catalogs. To name two of many features in the TC which could have made it into a "second cut" that W3C Process made impossible: the #ALL keyword and the DATA declared value.] In short, there was nothing fundamentally *innovative* about XML 1.0. | This would make namespaces unnecessary, and add a *ton* of additional | benefits. Indeed, but it looks to me that the XML world is still deeply mired in prejudices inherited from prior exposure to happy-go-taggy HTML. Tags[1] still connote verbs to many, and to that extent there is a predisposition favoring naming conventions that directly say what to do. This is the thinking behind the urge to use "html:ul" for an unordered list in an ostensibly FooML document. But naming by provenance rather than naming by contextual purpose forgets a fundamental lesson of SGML: that it's all about naming because names are instrumental. The lesson gets lost all too often precisely because the ancillary mechanisms to fix associations are so weak in ISO 8879. | Anyway, maybe one way around the omission of remapping from XML 1.0 is to | add another layer. There's no getting around the need for a markup facility in the instance document. (Because it isn't always an issue of "document types", and having to add a separate layer for a one-off simply will not fly. One basic point about AFs is that it's about how a document, not a document type, maps to various document types - even where there's only one such type involved!) [1] See the first Q/A in Part 5 of Not the SGML FAQ: http://www.flightlab.com/~joe/sgml/faq-not.txt
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