Re: Attributes with Intent (and namespaces)

MURATA Makoto (murata@apsdc.ksp.fujixerox.co.jp)
Wed, 01 Jul 1998 13:20:08 +0900

Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>
> This is very clear :-). It is exactly this sort of thing that concerns me.
> It's not that it's intrinsically difficult, but:
> - a it's easy for someone to overlook when writing an *application*.
> (Remember that - at present - inheritance is implemented by the application.
> - *every* application - potentially - has to consider whether
> 'inheritance' applies to it. It may decide it doesn't need to worry, but
> the author of the documents may assume that all applications are
> 'inheritance-aware'. This will certainly not be true.
> - the word 'inheritance' is understood differently by different SGML/XML
> experts and therefore may lead to differences in implementation.

We can implement attribute inheritance by SAX or other event-driven
API's (e.g., XML in perl).

We only have to introduce one method of the class DocumentHandler.

setInheritedAttributes(String)

This sets names of inherited attributes. By default,
"xml:lang" and "xml:space" are inherited.

An attributeList (the second argument for startElement)
now contains attribute-value pairs for inherited
attributes.

Does such an API cover your concern?

Of course, this has to become namespace-aware. That is, the argument
of setInheritedAttribute should be a pair of URI and local part.

Does this cause troubles to your implementation? > Paul

Makoto

Fuji Xerox Information Systems

Tel: +81-44-812-7230 Fax: +81-44-812-7231
E-mail: murata@apsdc.ksp.fujixerox.co.jp