xml-dev - RE: Didier's lab report

[Didier PH Martin <martind@netfolder.com>]

Hello Nikita,

Nikita said:
Sorry,  I just had to reply to this:
On the contrary, one of the greatest advantages of Topic Maps is that they
do allow conditional inclusions. They do it by means of "scope".

For example, you can say:
In the scope of WML aware client use this stylesheet,
in the scope IE5 use another stylesheet
and in the scope of NC and IE4  and IE3 use yet  third stylesheet.
I used this approach a couple of months ago and quite successfully!.
Same thing applies to the values of XSLT parameters.

It is clear and "tripleless" (forgive me, Uche) :-)))

Didier replies:
You are right Nikita, the scope potentially allows conditional inclusions.
Based on the scope we may add or suppress a link (i.e. a topic). Sorry
Nikita I forgot the scope attribute. But, in order to bring some light here,
let's precise the context where this is possible.

You probably said that in the context of having a topic map engine that
would consider the topics as inclusion constructs. In that case, yes, you
are right, the scope allows conditional inclusions. I was more thinking
about topic maps as linkbases without attributing an "include behavior" to
the links. However, I should say that it is possible to create a topic map
engine that consider the topics or the links as "include" constructs and
thus perform a conditional inclusion based on the scope. Seen through the
angle that a topic map engine may interpret topic maps as "include"
constructs, the answer is yes, obviously, using the scope allows to perform
conditional inclusion.

cheers
Didier PH Martin
----------------------------------------------
Email: martind@netfolder.com
Conferences: xml devcon 2000 (http://www.xmldevcon2000.com)
		 Wireless Summit NY (http:www.pulver.com)
	       xml devcon 2001 London (http://www.xmldevcon2000.com)
Book: XML Professional (http://www.wrox.com)
column: xml.com (http://www.xml.com)