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hi.
here is my newest approach to convince people that the infoset should be
extensible and that the extensions should be made visible through other
technologies.
people seem to think the the infoset is just xml markup in an abstract
way. actually, it is more, because building the infoset involves some
non-trivial tasks, such as identifying ID and IDREF(S) and making sure
that they are used properly.
also, the infoset could be regarded as being composed out of two layers,
one being xml 1.0 alone, the other one adding namespaces. so let's take
a look at this comment:
Amelia A Lewis wrote:
> A namespace declaration is not an attribute (even if DOM treats it like
> one). When you turn on namespace processing in SAX2, prefix mappings
> are reported before the element that they appear on. The thing that is
> lexically an attribute in the XML is not reported as an attribute in the
> start element event.
so people have already accepted the fact that some semantics (probably
useful to them) are exposed through the infoset, in this case the
namespaceness of an attribute. however, this also requires an additional
layer of processing, identifying namespace declarations, testing names
for their conformance to namespace-requirements, and making sure that
all prefixes are used consistently. in most cases, people don't want to
do this themselves and are happy that it is already done by their parser
or xslt processor or whatever they are using.
and even though a namespace declaration *is* an attribute, treating it
also as something different makes life in namespace-aware environments
much easier. in the same way, treating an xlink-element as something
different (an abstract link item) would make life in link-aware
environments much easier.
my point here is that the infoset as we have it today already mixes two
things (xml 1.0 and namespaces - actually it also supports xml base,
which could be seen as yet another layer, but this would lead too
far...). i think that this is ok, but seeing it this way may make it
easier for people to accept that other semantics might also be
interesting to certain application domains and should be exposed through
the infoset.
cheers,
erik wilde - tel:+41-1-6325132 - fax:+41-1-6321035
mailto:net.dret@dret.net - http://dret.net/
computer engineering and networks laboratory
swiss federal institute of technology (eth)
* try not. do, or do not. there is no try. *
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