Re: Possible small RDDL enhancement

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 10:42 PM 3/18/01 -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
>It dawns on me that it might be useful for a RDDL to declare
>what namespace or mime-type it claims to be describing.  Would
>it make sense to create a new optional element type, <rddl:class>,
>with attributes ns= and/or media-type=, which could be used for
>this purpose?  I was thinking of using attributes, but sometimes
>a rddl might be used to describe more than one class of documents.

I got into that a bit in XPDL:
http://www.simonstl.com/projects/xpdl/wd051000.html#Sec2.2

Now that we have RDDL, I'm leaning toward the opinion that MIME types are a 
very weak substitute for the kind of detailed information URIs backed with 
RDDL can provide.

I'm also really intrigued by the possibility of interacting descriptions, 
where it becomes possible to talk about multiple namespaces in a given 
document in some coherent way.  I'm especially intrigued by the RELAX 
'divide-and-validate' bit:
http://www.xml.gr.jp/relax/divideAndValidate.html
http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1109

I'm starting to think about programs that explore RDDL files over the 
course of processing documents.  Could be some interesting possibilities there.


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books