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RE: "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basicprinciples

• From: David Lee <dlee@calldei.com>
• To: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>, "Rushforth, Peter"<Peter.Rushforth@N...>
• Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2012 15:01:09 +0000

John Cowan Sez ...
> This all seems to me nothing more than a vast to-do about whether
> a general-purpose href attribute ought to be xlink:href or xml:ref.
> I cannot take the question seriously.  "Parturient montes, nascetur
> ridiculus mus."

My take is a little more serious.  If an attribute is part of the xml namespace then there is a presumption that all consumers of "XML" understand and apply the semantics.  I would think it would be a "must do".  But putting an attribute in another namespace makes it a "do if you want to support that thingy".   I think this is a big difference.
Therefore I am on the side of minimal amounts of attributes in the xml namespace ... OTOH I do understand the desire to put more in so that one could count on all consumers understanding and enforcing the semantics.  But that's the rub with this suggestion, IMHO.
Unlike HTML where the intent of the HTML semantics is very tightly bound to presentation in a browser.  XML (or MicroXML) is not necessarily bound to presentation semantics.  So what does it mean in the general sense to recognize and support the semantics of href and friends ?
I think that will be a very difficult thing to define and get consensus, and also very difficult to validate conformance.  Only in certain use cases does it have meaning (even if those are common). This is the big blocker for me. 

----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org

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  • Re: "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basicprinciples of MicroXML"
    • From: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>