xml-dev - Re: Scripting and XML

["Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@allette.com.au>]

> From: Simeon Simeonov <simeons@allaire.com>
 
> I absolutely agree with this point: markup will have to be added to aid
> external scripts. But that could be inconvenient. Yes, it is more powerful.
 
> Again, in principle I agree. However, I don't think that this approach is
> scalable for some applications. I can easily think of more than a 100
> classes of textual input that I would like to validate. I would find it
> confusing to have to work with more than a 100 tags just for input
> validation. For not very common input types, I would prefer your third
> example to the fourth one. Essentially, I am arguing against tag number
> explosion.
 
Which is why you should not use elements but processing instructions.
Don't pollute the element space those things that are not elements.

The first token in a processing instruction should identify what the
"target" of the processing instruction is.  (This might be identified
formally in a notation declaration too.)  So you can have
a million different types of processing instructions added, one
for every flavour of Java or Javascript or ECMAscript or everything
called dynamic HTML or serverside includes.  All at the same
time, all clearly labelled.  

e.g. {sun-java1 ...}{ms-java ...}{sun-java1.1 ...}

And the processing instructions allow markup that does not follow the
bondaries of the elements.  You can start something in the middle of
one string in one element and end it somewhere in a cousin.

There is a place for putting scripts in nice elements, for those
that act globally, or get invoked by user agents, but inline 
scripts that merely process some text automatically are better done
in processing instructions rather than corrupt the element structure.


Rick Jelliffe

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