It would also open up the prospect of treating other compounds - like the
CSS style attribute, some of the path information in SVG, and various other
places where the principle of one chunk, one string has been violated - as
a set of atoms which could themselves be validated and/or transformed
and/or typed.This leads to another kinds of post-processing infoset, where the atoms are
available as an ordered set of child nodes, but it seems like a promising road.
There is another mechanism which may be a part of a solution.
I have ealier proposed to the XML schema group a mechanism where
it is possible
to handle "parsable encodings" such as XPath expressions and SVG paths
in strings (attributes, etc.),
called "microparsing".
In these cases are regular expressions not really sufficient because
of complex parsing rules.
What I proposed was a mechanism to annotate "compressed" attributes
with an equivalent
XML representatation, ie a binding between string and a corresponding
XML fragment.
This means that XPath strings can be unpacked or tokenized into XML.
However this leaves some problems: how should these specialized parser be identified and bound at runtime.
/anders