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Re: NMTOKENS: good or evil?

• To: Laurent Le Meur <laurent.lemeur@a...>
• Subject: Re: NMTOKENS: good or evil?
• From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
• Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2006 09:04:15 -0700
• Cc: newsml-2@y..., xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <200602151815.k1FIF0dX001006@a...>
• References: <200602151815.k1FIF0dX001006@a...>
• User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5 (X11/20051201)

Laurent Le Meur wrote:
> The IPTC NewsML2 Working Group (www.iptc.org/dev) has tried to avoid NMTOKENS is
> drafting its specification. 
>  
>
> The reason is that using a list of space-separated values is not really
> conformant to “the XML way” (it is à priori sensible to have a sub-element for
> each enumerated value). And that we don’t know about an easy way to process them
> using XSLT, XPATH or DOM for example. The problem seems rooted in XML parsers
> themselves, which usually treat them as strings (and not as collections of
> tokens) [1].
>   

Forget DOM ;-) OK just kidding, but surely almost any language that
would be hosting a DOM has string ops that would make handling NMTOKENS
trivial. As for XPath and XSLT, don't forget EXSLT

http://www.exslt.org/

The string module functions split() and tokenize() make it easy to
handle NMTOKENS values. The string module has very good support in
popular XSLT processors.

So NMTOKENS are neither good nor evil. They just are. And they are
*very* far from the toughest nut to crack in XML.

-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net                    http://fourthought.com
http://copia.ogbuji.net                   http://4Suite.org
Articles: http://uche.ogbuji.net/tech/publications/

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