xml-dev - Re: Notations

["W. Eliot Kimber" <eliot@dns.isogen.com>]

At 03:01 AM 9/30/98 -0400, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:

>This means that a good SYSTEM identifier for a NOTATIOn would be
>a semicolon-separated list of MIME media types, e.g.

But wouldn't that be just as good as a public ID? After all, the MIME type
name space is managed to about the same degree the formal public ID name
space is. I see no reason not to use MIME types as the external IDs for
notations that have associated MIME types.

>It's not clear to me how useful notations are in XML.  Really, the
>only use of NDATA should probably be to indicate that an external entity
>is unparsed... which would have been better done using XLink anyway!

They have exactly the same use they do in SGML. Xlink does not make the
critical utility of entities go away just because it provides a more direct
way to point to storage objects. If you're creating large XML document
where the indirection of entities is of value, then you should be able to
use them).

And *NEVER FORGET* that notations can be applied to elements and their
content, which is at least as valuable as applying them to data entities.

Notations are a critically important part of the SGML design and provide
exactly the same value to XML.

Cheers,

E.
--
<Address HyTime=bibloc>
W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer
ISOGEN International Corp.
2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 75202.  214.953.0004
www.isogen.com
</Address>

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