Re: Inheritance/defaulting of attributes

Paul Prescod (papresco@technologist.com)
Fri, 10 Oct 1997 09:49:59 -0400

akirkpatrick@ims-global.com wrote:
> How do we stop the authors actually using <inline> and <block> which
> have little meaning as they are? Do we need a "pure virtual" syntax
> which indicates that an element type cannot be instantiated in the
> instance?

Yes, in my essay I introduce a <!CLASS ...> declaration ro abstract
supertypes.

> Either way, I like this idea a lot. Does the instance syntax proposal for
> XML take any of this into account? If so, I might be converted, on the
> assumption that this type of thing won't make it into the SGML revision.

Well I think that something inheritance-like is going into the revision.
We just have to push for it to be straightforward and "first-class"
rather than indirected as archforms are.

Paul Prescod