xml-dev - Re: XML & Entities inclusion against Inline Tag facilities.

[Peter@ursus.demon.co.uk (Peter Murray-Rust)]

In message <3.0.32.19970522065649.00c4f168@swbell.net> "W. Eliot Kimber" writes:
> At 09:52 AM 5/22/97 GMT, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
[...]
> ><CML>
> >The rate of this reaction is given by 
> ><A HREF="eqn1.xml">equation 1</A>
> ></CML>
> >where eqn1.xml might be written in MathML.  
> >)
> 
> There is *NOT* a name space problem in this case.  The document "eqnl.xml"
> is *parsed* outside the scope of the document that references (it is
> semantically and functionally identical to a SUBDOC reference in normal
> SGML).  Once the document is parsed, the result of that parsing is
> combined, by application-specific means, with the document tree of the
> referencing document.  At that point, things like content model constraints
> are irrelevant and there are *NO* name space problems. 

Thanks for clarifying this.  Please treat me as the archetypal newcomer
who means well.

Understood.  This is in fact what I do, but I was slightly misled
in the draft by the phrase under 'EMBED':

the 'designated resource should be embedded for the purposes of display or 
processing in the body of the resource and at the location where the traversal
started'.  I (mis)read that to mean that the spec required the remote
resource to be emebedded and then processed (i.e. parsed).  

I also share your concern with the likelihood of linking to a document
without a DOCTYPE which may have tags in common and where there is a 
possibility of confusion.  Since you point out that 'embedding' is really a 
pointer, then the application can keep the namespaces separate, though it
could be easy to make mistakes.

[...]
> One confusion factor here is that, unlike SGML today (but not in the near
> future), if an XML file has no DOCTYPE declaration it can be used as either
> an external text entity (parsed in the context of its reference) or as a
> document entity (parsed in isolation), and you can't tell by looking at the
> entity which it was intended to be.  In a very real sense, XML is saying
> that all external entities are either subdocuments or documents, even
> though XML doesn't include the formal notion of subdocument as in SGML.

Exactly.  And it is possible to see cases where a given file is used in
both ways (a) included through entities and (b) pointed to by LINK.

[... thanks for the explanation of notation ...]  I had not appreciated
the use of the NOTATION to flag PI-types and will adopt this. 

	P.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust, domestic net connection
Virtual School of Molecular Sciences
http://www.vsms.nottingham.ac.uk/

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