Re: Namespaces, Architectural Forms, and Sub-Documents

W. Eliot Kimber (eliot@isogen.com)
Wed, 18 Feb 1998 20:01:58 -0600

At 10:39 AM 2/19/98 +0900, MURATA Makoto wrote:
>
>In message "Re: Namespaces, Architectural Forms, and Sub-Documents", Peter
Murray-Rust
>wrote...
>> I hope that the "disgusting" refers to the use of 'img' and 'src' and the
>> implied semantics rather than the mechanism :-). I am an advocate of the
>> *mechanism* (e.g
>> http://www.vsms.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms/talks/chemwebvei/020.html) where I
>> use XML-LINK explicitly to combine chemistry, maths and text. This has the
>> advantage that it avoids namespace problems. It also allows me to process
>> foreign files if certain assumptions are made.
>
>I think that your approach works. Do you think that this is the way
>to go? I.e., no namespace mechanisms but links only? Or, do you think
>that it should be possible to convert the link-based representation to
>the namespace-based representation and vice versa?

My vote is for the link-based approach (which in HyTime is provided by the
value reference facility, which lets you distinquish simple
use-by-reference from true hyperlinks). A processor can always generate
new combined instances using whatever approach it cares to to disambiguate
name clashes, including using name spaces.

Syntactic combination is ultimately limiting and largely unnecessary if you
can do your combining at the semantic level. However, semantic-level
combination does have a cost because you can't necessarily depend on the
limitations of syntactic constraints to keep things simple.

Cheers,

E.

--
<Address HyTime=bibloc>
W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer
Highland Consulting, a division of ISOGEN International Corp.
2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 95202.  214.953.0004
www.isogen.com
</Address>


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