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Re: Architectural Forms revival?


data revival download
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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