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   Re: [xml-dev] Co-operating with Architectural Forms

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* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| The way schema information is piggy-backed into the existing schema
| language in a way that makes it appear in the instance data rather
| than in the schema itself is ugly to me.

* Steven R. Newcomb
| 
| AFs can work if you don't have a DTD, which can be quite important
| in XML-land.  Of course, in that case, you have to provide the AF
| information in each element's attributes.  If there's no schema,
| there's no other way, is there?

Well, you could reference some external mapping document, but in both
cases it's a question of, should I put the information locally, or
reference it, and I agree that choices are limited.

| So what's the problem?

That AFs have been shoe-horned into the existing DTD syntax. I like
AFs, I just wish they could be specified using a nicer syntax. For XML
I think an XML-like syntax would do nicely, like the one John Cowan
proposed.

Another possibility might be to use SAF to attach AF declarations to
XML Schema type declarations.

One thing we should consider seriously is to propose to WG1 that DSDL
get direct support for architectural forms. That would mean that this
problem would at least go away if you use RELAX-NG.
 
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Also very ugly is the way many attribute values end up being
| structured in ways that should rather be structured with markup.
 
* Steven R. Newcomb
|
| Are you saying that AFs are ugly because neither SGML nor XML
| provides a way to structure attribute values, and that AFs were
| designed to live within that limitation? 

Yes.

| It seems unreasonable to complain that the ugliness of AFs is due to
| the fact that they're designed to actually WORK, even though they
| have nothing to work with but the SGML and XML markup languages.

It's entirely possible to specify architectural forms using SGML/XML
syntax, and that would have been enormously much nicer, and probably
also a lot easier for people to understand.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >





 

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