Re: Associating DSSSL style sheets with documents

Eve L. Maler (elm@arbortext.com)
Fri, 14 Mar 1997 15:12:34 -0500

At 01:10 PM 3/14/97 -0600, Len Bullard wrote:
>Eve L. Maler wrote:
>>
>> I've also been beating the drum on the WG list about how our PIs should
>> have "GIs" as well as "attribute specs," so I'd prefer to see <?XML
>> stylesheet att1="val1" att2="val2"... ?>. This way, "<?XML" targets the PI
>> so that it will be processed by an XML-aware processor, and the rest
>> identifies the semantics of the instruction.
>
>This looks weirdly like DTD/instance built into the XML instance.
>So, XML then defines an application inside the instance?
>
>I understand it because this is how IADS and IDE/AS did links
>originally. However, it created interoperability problems
>and does to this day. What is the difference between this
>and a tag bag of empty elements included at the top of a DTD?
>
>len

The difference is that, by convention, you're making PI markup available
that's available to every document and to every *location* in a document if
necessary, no matter what its DTD (and no matter whether it even has one).
It just happens to look suspiciously like a start-tag, which may be helpful
to any software that has to parse the PI string.

I don't think links in general should be done this way, but I do believe in
PIs being used for, uh, instructions to processors. (In other words, I'm
not 100% against PIs, as some people are.) In particular, I'm starting to
get very fond of PIs for anything that has to be specified per entity.

Eve