xml-dev - Re: XHTML and the Three Namespaces

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 01:00 PM 9/25/99 -0400, you wrote:
>> There is no reason why something that is uniquely identified can have only
>> one definition.  Architectural forms are a classic tool for describing this
>> situtation in markup, and in 'reality' there are many many many many many
>> many cases where you can have multiple definitions, formal or otherwise,
>> for the same uniquely identified thing.  (Don't get me going into
>> epistemology, please...)
>
>I guess I am misreading the implication that architectural forms allow
>you to provide multiple content models for a single element type, right?
>How then do they provide multiple definitions for something that is
>uniquely identified? It seems to me that precisely the opposite is true:
>they allow you to share a single definition (in terms of a given element
>form) among multiple element types with different identities.

Architectural forms will allow to say that A and B are both really forms of C.

They also let you say that C is both an A and a B.  As A and B can have
different definitions, C therefore may have multiple definitions.

There are plenty of variations on this theme, of course, but the basic
point is that anything, even things uniquely identified, may of course have
multiple definitions. Those multiple definitions may not even be known to a
given user, or even to the designer of a schema/DTD, but they're still
'lurking' out there.

An HTML p element is both a strict:p and a transitional:p - both
definitions are perfectly acceptable.  Is there a good reason to prefer
strict:p and transitional:p to html:p?  I still haven't heard any.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer (2nd Ed - September)
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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