xml-dev - RE: Notations

["Biron,Paul V" <Paul.V.Biron@kp.ORG>]

>From: Ronald Bourret <rbourret@ito.tu-darmstadt.de>
>Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 11:01:14 +0100
>Subject: RE: Notations

>Dean Roddey wrote:
>> Just from a practical standpoint though, if you found an element that had
>> say three notations. One said it was MIDI, one said it was Base64, and
one
>> said it was zipped. Was it base64'd then zipped, or zipped then base
64'd?
>> How would one indicate the ordering of original transformations in such a
>> situation, so that it could be untransformed correctly back?

>Your application would need to know the order.  Given that there are no 
>standard notations at the moment, this doesn't seem unreasonable, as the 
>application needs to know what the notations mean, anyway.

>If people "standardize" notations, this is a fair question.  One quick hack

>would be a NMTOKENS attribute that contained the names of the notation 
>attributes (or notations) in the order in which they were to be applied. 
> Or course, that attribute would need to be "standardized", too.

>- -- Ron Bourret

There's always the option of creating a NOTATION which itself defines the
particular processing pipeline, as in

<!NOTATION midi-gzip-base64 SYSTEM "http://www.foo.com/midi/gzip/base64">

where the information contained at the URL will tell you, in addition to the
necessary info about each individual "notation", about the ordering of
processing inorder to recover the source data.

But I think this example shows the limitations of the "general" solution
that NOTATIONS provide.  Being general means that everyone has to "reinvent"
the wheel in many cases on top of that generality.

Paul V. Biron
SGML Business Analyst
Kaiser Permanente, So Cal.




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