xml-dev - Re: Architectural Forms and XAF

[Sean McGrath <digitome@iol.ie>]

[Steve Newcomb on AFs]

>When looking at such an element, select the attribute that
>corresponds to the meta DTD you're interested in interpreting the
>element as conforming to; the value of that attribute is the tagname
>for all purposes of that meta DTD.)
>

In other words, (as I have said before, years ago
on comp.text.sgml), there
is nothing "meta" about meta DTDs.
They are essentially, a device for
simple one-to-one mappings of element
type name to element type name with some
extra bells on.

In my world, this facility fails the "so what"
test.

Oh how I wish the real world were so simple,
that a basic mapping system sufficed to
get real work done.

I cannot understand why people think
that this capability solves so many
real world problems. It doesn't in
my experience.

Simple mapping of source elememt type name
to destination element type name makes
up about 0.00001% of what I do in
SGML/XML processing work. The
other 99.00009% is made up of re-arranging
sub-trees, collapsing strucures, expanding
structures, hoisting content to attribute,
dropping attributes to data content etc. etc.

The declarative syntax of XSLT is a lot
closer to the money for my work as it
goes beyond simple element mapping and
sub-tree pruning. Not that XSLT does
not have its problems from my perspective
but that is a different rant:-)

regards,

http://www.pyxie.org - an Open Source XML Processing library for Python


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