xml-dev - RE: Patterns - What is it?

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

When I see that, if I weren't also a 
documentWonk, I would say that is the 
structure for a jazz composition in which 
the head is played strictly as it establishes a 
theme, and the body is played once according 
to score and is improvised after that.  

Head/Body can be compared to other forms 
in pop such as Verse/Chorus/Verse/Bridge/Chorus 
and so forth.  Many interesting design 
patterns cross over into different media 
and while each may have some different 
semantic, the commonality is interesting 
and illuminating to the creative process.  

One might say HTML is a jazz of markup; 
well-defined but loosely structured and 
capable of rendering many styles as a 
result.  On the other hand, hard to 
predict and sometimes bizarre in the 
final rendering.  Ultimately, one 
chooses the level of formality required 
and plays to the local audience.

Don't Play Bach When They Came To Boogie.

Len 

http://fly.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/lensongs.ram

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Rick JELLIFFE [mailto:ricko@geotempo.com]

For example, one of the most basic patterns is the one variously called
the "document skeleton" or "document shell":  that is the simple
structure that whenever information units grow to a certain level of
size or have a strong semantic or processing cohesiveness compared to
the outside material, we will see a common structure  
  thing
     - head (with metadata)
     - body (with data)

At the lowest level, this is actually supported in the element tag
syntax, but it scales all the way up so that documents will often be
structured at the highest level in a similar way. 

It is such a common pattern, but I doubt that if we asked people on
XML-DEV or any of the W3C working groups what that was called, that we
would get a recognised term.