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They are XML, David. The debate for
getting rid of them came down to them being an escape clause for hopefully
unusual situations. Simply, they are used to pass out-of-band local system
information to another system of the same kind (for some n of kind. Versions
matter.) Mostly I see them used to pass formatting information such as in the
example. I’m not going to bother defending
them. They can have legitimate uses given short lived instances with either
very well-defined semantics and as circumscribed as possible. On the other
hand, I’m rather surprised to be seeing documents full of them produced
by tools that possibly should be retired if possible (not possible where there
is not agreement or working XSL and that is very possible). In this case, I believe they should have
disappeared by now but apparently not, so let me be more specific: are those
of you publishing to the 2361 B standard or using more specifically, 40051B_AMCCOM.fosi,
still using these? FWIW: the C version using XSL is a
smarter system and will work well once the bugs in the XSL are worked out,
documents describing the XSL contributions published, a few bugs in the DTD
fixed (all easy). It will be a bloody day getting it accepted but that’s
a different problem. len From: David Lee
[mailto:dlee@calldei.com] I for one have NEVER
used a PI nor have ever encountered one nor have ever found any desirable use
for one. Reading the specs
for PI's years ago always left me wondering ... of the few things XML allows
why PI's? They must have grand
uses but I never figured it out. I have missed the boat if there
ever was one. So *MY* follow-up
question is What were PIs used for that they were so important to include in
XML ? My guess being
something from the SGML world which I never visited in my starship. From: Len Bullard
[mailto:Len.Bullard@ses-i.com] I’ve been away from XML military tech pubs for some
years, so a question: are formatting processing instructions still very
common or should XSL-FO, FOSI etc. have eliminated those by now? Is this <?PubTbl row rht=”0.31in” /> still common in delivered documents? Does this
impact the reusability of the deliverable? I had thought items like that were long gone but apparently
not. Len Bullard ILS Manager Science and
Engineering Services, Inc len.bullard@ses-i.com |