xml-dev - Re: Are PI targets arbitrary?

[Tyler Baker <tyler@infinet.com>]

James Tauber wrote:

> I'm starting to put some options into FOP that are triggered by processing
> instructions. My initial thought was use 'fop' as the target.
>
> But then it occurred to me: PI targets can be associated with a URI via a
> NOTATION declaration. This is *a lot* like namespaces. Does that mean PI
> targets should be arbitrary proxies?
>
> Instead of looking for PIs with the target "fop" should I instead be looking
> for PIs with the target which is a NOTATION declared with URI
> http://www.jtauber.com/fop/
> After all, some other application might use the target "fop" but only mine
> would use the NOTATION with URI http://www.jtauber.com/fop/.

This with a little more thought and creativity could evolve into a usable
alternative to "Namespaces in XML".  I have had ideas myself about using pi's as
namespace delimiters, but because of my lack of SGML experience, I really have
not looked into the utility of using notations in any of my applications.  This
looks like something that combined with PI's would be a powerful and simple
namespaces implementation that would surpass the the usefulness of "Namespaces in
XML" in just about every way imaginable.  Perhaps there may be a use of Notations
in XML after all.

This is a great idea.  You would do the XML community a great favor if you could
expand upon this concept to cover namespaces in general, since the current
"Namespaces in XML" is pretty much unusable for any component-oriented
application as well as for using XML for interchange.  This has a lot of
potential and considering your success with FOP to date, you probably have a
better idea than anyone around as to the direction you think this should go.

Thanx for the ideas,

Tyler


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