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On Mon, 2002-03-04 at 11:31, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> > Documents may now be read as describing multiple infosets - one
> >including XInclude elements as elements, one representing the result of
> >complete infoset merging, and various infosets representing possible
> >failure states.
> >
>
> No, that's the confusion. A single XML document describes a single
> infoset. A single document does not describe multiple infosets.
> Performing inclusion on a document generates a new infoset, which if
> you choose can be serialized into a new document. (Actually there are
> a few holes in the spec here, but they're not relevant to the current
> discussion.) This is not, however, the infoset that was described by
> any of the original documents (again, except in the trivially
> uninteresting case where the original document did not contain any
> xinclude:include elements).
>
> Documents may not be read as describing multiple infosets, at least
> not if you wish to be conformant to the various W3C specs. You can
> use XInclusion to produce new infosets from old infosets, but then
> you can do this with XSLT, SAX, or DOM, so this is nothing new.
I'm sorry, Elliotte, but I think we've reached the basis of our
confusion. I see documents as actually having content, not as a
framework for performing potentially randomly-sequenced infoset
transformations in order to figure out what the content might/should be.
The old distinction between logical and entity models made it possible
to distinguish the content of a document (entity model) from its content
- the logical model - while still permitting some shortcuts on the
entity side.
You appear to be defining XML processing as a set of algorithms
performed upon infosets, each of which is a unique abstraction. While I
don't mind work at that level in cases where we already know what the
document contains, I have to oppose it as a technique for determining
the actual contents of the document.
In ways I find important, XML works because I can say "show me the
bytes" and actually do something with the bytes, not with potentially
unknown understanding of what infoset those bytes are really talking
about. It used to be that in a worst case I case say "show me the
canonicalized bytes", but XInclude appears to take away that option.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com
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