RE: Related resources (was Re: Namespace or document gloss?)

[Miles Sabin <MSabin@interx.com>]

Edd Dumbill wrote,
> OK, I'll try again on this.  It seems to me that the sort of 
> bundles we might want to be able to apply to documents in an 
> indirected fashion, we might also reasonably want to apply in a 
> hardwired manner too.

Agreed ... if it sounded like I was arguing otherwise it was
only because it looked as tho' hard-wiring was the _only_
possibility being considered.

> The problem I think I want solving is some kind of 
> reconciliation between the proliferation of things like:
>
> <?xml-stylesheet .. ?>
> xsi:schemaLocation 
>
> Seems to me that we're solving this problem along the way here. 

Again agreed. And coming from the indirection direction it
would be nice to have the option of _not_ having to hard-wire
a reference to a stylesheet into a document instance: I've
always thought that sat very uneasily with the desire to
separate presentation from content. If we could use related
resources to eliminate those references and simultaneously
manage to avoid (where desirable) replacing them with a new hard-
wired reference to those related resources that'd be a win.

> The things that we're defining for namespaces work equally well 
> for document instances.  In which case not only do I want the 
> ability to hardwire this *if I wish*, but I'd also like to be 
> able to apply bundles to document fragments (ie.  anything an 
> XPointer can reference).

OK, so we have several types of associations in play,

  namespace         <-> resources
  document instance <-> resources
  document fragment <-> resources

and in all three cases we have a choice between hard-wired or
indirected (maybe it'd be better to use XLink terms: outbound
and third-party).

It also looks like we might well find that multiple resource 
collections apply to a (part of a) document: via it's
namespaces, hard-wired into the doc instance, external etc. So
maybe we need something that'd end up looking a teensy bit like
the CSS cascade (or, in software terms, a chain of Decorators).

> I'm hoping to solve the sort of problem I describe in
> http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200012/msg00120.html
>
> The way I see it I'm looking for a standard way (by which I 
> mean a vocabulary and syntax(es) on which we all agree) to 
> describe related resources, and then ways to attach these to a 
> namespace, a document, or a document fragment--or inline them 
> when deemed necessary.  Can others see this use case?

Absolutely.

Cheers,


Miles

-- 
Miles Sabin                               InterX
Internet Systems Architect                5/6 Glenthorne Mews
+44 (0)20 8817 4030                       London, W6 0LJ, England
msabin@interx.com                         http://www.interx.com/