Re: [xml-dev] Text Markup Part II

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

Peter Flynn scripsit:

> Thank you for reminding me -- a good example. I don't remember (and now  
> cannot find, as most of the links there have broken over time) details  
> of how LMNL announces its presence: is this assumed to be in the  
> filetype, or is there a marker somewhere? 

There is a LMNL declaration analogous to the XML declaration: both are
optional.  In-band document type identification can never be completely
reliable, as it may be accidentally spoofed by something else (just look
at all the comments in your local copy of /etc/magic).  Out-of-band
identification is reliable if present, but may easily get lost: when
an HTTP resource is saved on the local file system, the Content-Type:
header is almost always discarded.

> I was taking (A) to mean marking up a fragment inside a document  
> *without* heralding the fact. I really don't see a use case for that,  
> apart from providing for serendipitous discovery.

Well, what comes to mind is the recognition of XLinks in arbitrary XML
documents based on the xlink namespace.  There is no identification
tag saying "This document has XLinks"; you do have to discover it
by serendipity or exhaustive search.  (The presence of the namespace
declaration, though necessary, is not sufficient.)

-- 
John Cowan  http://ccil.org/~cowan    cowan@ccil.org
There are books that are at once excellent and boring.  Those that at
once leap to the mind are Thoreau's Walden, Emerson's Essays, George
Eliot's Adam Bede, and Landor's Dialogues.  --Somerset Maugham