OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

 


 

   Re: Attributes with Intent

[ Lists Home | Date Index | Thread Index ]
  • From: Peter Murray-Rust <peter@ursus.demon.co.uk>
  • To: xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
  • Date: Mon, 04 May 1998 20:08:39

At 09:17 04/05/98 -0500, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
>At 08:33 AM 5/4/98 -0400, David Megginson wrote:
>
>>Your point is well-taken, though: fragments of XML documents are often
>>tightly bound to their context (similar situations would involve
>>attributes for effectivity, security level, revision status, etc.).
>
>But one of the advantages of a hierarchically-structured data
>representation is the ability to have scopes to which properties apply. If
>a processor can't at least maintain a stack of the attributes of the
>ancestors of the current element, it's pretty darn braindead.

I suppose most of my code must be pretty darn undead then... The point I
was making is that 'scope' is introduced in a total of about 3-4 sentences
in total in the XML + XLink specs. It's actually quite easy for an
implementer to miss. I'm not complaining - I'm saying that it would be
useful to discuss whether we can all implement this easily and if so how.
[BTW how much freely available is actually out there which implements
any/all of these attributes?]  The touchstone of XML-applications - the
desperate Perl Hacker - is not necessarily going to build a stack of the
attributes of an/every element. And I'd represent - gently - that some
people (at least one) are going to have met attribute re-mapping for the
first time and possibly get muddled. 

For example it seems that a Node must have 2-3 sets of methods:
	getAttributeValue(String attName);
	getPseudoAttributeValue(String specialAttnameInContext)
and 
	getPseudoAttributeValueAfterRemapping(String possiblyRemappedAttributeName)

If this is a useful way forward (other than the somewhat contrived names)
it would be nice to know. If not, what?

	P. 

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)





 

News | XML in Industry | Calendar | XML Registry
Marketplace | Resources | MyXML.org | Sponsors | Privacy Statement

Copyright 2001 XML.org. This site is hosted by OASIS