xml-dev - Re: Nested schemas

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

From: Bryan Cooper <bryan.cooper@veritas.com>

>How do we ensure the parser is told to switch between 2 or more
>different information parsers which use some common words in different
>ways?  I think there's a need to resolve this issue - course I may have
>missed the easy way to do that.

This is what the "Namespaces" proposal is about: a way to combine fragments of documents which may use the same words. The approach
is basically to say that every name (i.e. element type name or attribute name) actualyl has two parts: first the name as used in the
originating document, second the name of the namespace to which it belongs.

See www.w3.org/TR in the drafts section for details. The new draft is fairly clear I think. (Except for the Appendix...what a messy
idea!)

>It would be interesting to see how XML could be used instead to
>inter-operate between the parser and the application where there were
>staged parsing based upon information within the information.
>This extension would need to be supported in the DTD so people
>could easily tell the XML parser when and where to breakdown the
>information.

XML does support a kind of  staged parsing, through the NOTATION mechanism. When you give an element a NOTATION attribute, you are
informing some later stage to interpret the contents of the element using the correct processor for that notation. This is how to
embed non-XML notations. (Note: this is not switching between notations: it is the foreign notation in XML, not stopping XML rules
and switching to the different rules.)

> I'd like to see EVENTS discussed in relation
>to nested schemas for example to help the parser switch schemas.

There already is another thing which is not elements or attributes, and I think it corresponds to what you are calling EVENTs: the
processing instruction allows any kind of non-structural (that is element structure) information to  be instered at points during in
the document. The XML header is one such processing instruction.

Rick Jelliffe



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