Re: [xml-dev] SGML default attributes.

["Norman Gray" <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>]

Greetings.

On 29 Apr 2016, at 16:30, Dave Pawson wrote:

> Thanks Chris. Food for thought.
> "XSLT becomes the agent of architectural mapping,"
>
> And it does step away from DTD's
Yes.  For those on-list who aren't tripping along their personal AF 
memory lanes at this point (mine has orchids with thorns, strewn all 
along the path), this might be the occasion to remark that a 
zeroth-order description of Architectural Forms is that they were a 
transformation of a document, specified within one or other DTD rather 
than in a separate transformation language.

This did not make for luminous syntax.  No.  But it was I think the 
conceptually Right Place for this transformation, it meant that that 
transformation could be implemented efficiently within the parser, and 
it meant that it was natural to conceive of the transformation as 
'pulling' the AF instance document out of the DTD instance document, 
which is a Really Useful Idea.

I'm pretty sure that you could reimplement much of the AF plumbing with 
XSLT if you wanted to.  I speculate that you could get the same 
conceptual advantages by developing a syntax for describing the AF, with 
the same semantics as the HyTime standard described for DTDs, from which 
you then generated an XSLT stylesheet which extracted that AF instance 
from a suitable range of input documents.

Best wishes,

Norman


--
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK