Re: Processing 'my' XML (was Re: Why Model Concepts?)

[Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>]

From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>

>>to be able to build structural dependencies into schemas so that users can
>>take document types for granted (and not need know why a stuctural
>>constraint is--unless they want to)
>
>I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this - could you explain this in
>more depth?

Sorry, that was bad even for me. XLink is an example of what I mean. By
using the XLink architecture, there will be less need for agreement between
humans (or computers) on the meaning of the specific labels, because they
already know about the architectural label. So the difficult task that Len
talks about of human agreement reduces to apply only to those people who
need to know the specifics: in many cases this may be no-one.

Of course, this is just shaving away at this hard problem, but it can be big
progress nonetheless.

On a side issue, it seems to me that conceptual modeling (taking that to
mean the use of modeling systems natural to the problem domain)  is one
reason why implementation languages (e.g. schema languages) need
extensibility and access to low-level, impure features. Parameter entities
may be ratty, but they are glue that conventions can use for higher-level
modeling; look at how even XML Schemas needed redefine for XHTML m12n--we
will die without a little sugar.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe