Thanks Chris. Food for thought.
"XSLT becomes the agent of architectural mapping,"
And it does step away from DTD's (no longer fashionable - shock horror)
regards
On 29 April 2016 at 15:55, Christopher R. Maden <> wrote:
> On 04/29/2016 03:33 AM, Dave Pawson wrote:
>>
>> Can anyone recall why attribute value defaulting was dropped
>> when XML was created?
>>
>> Does it seem 'useful' to anyone now?
>
>
> As Simon pointed out, attribute default values are in XML. However, the
> facility is provided via the DTD, which is optional, and if you parse an
> instance without reference to the DTD, you won’t get the default values...
>
> Partly (as someone else noted), this was based on our experience at EBT —
> the DynaText parser was perfectly capable of parsing SGML without a DTD (as
> long as there was no tag omission), and the stylesheet would typically
> encode behavior implied by default attributes, whether or not the default
> values were explicit in the parse. (And in fact, for some document types,
> the default attributes could bloat the size of the compiled book.)
>
> This is harder for arch forms; the application (XSLT or whatever else)
> becomes the agent of architectural mapping, rather than it being a property
> of the document, but I think that might be OK, too. Consider a
> meta-doctype, and rather than me writing a DTD that maps my doctype to your
> meta-doctype, I write an XSLT that annotates or transforms mine. That’s no
> worse than the DTD approach, IMO, and by separating the parse from the
> annotation, might be better.
>
> ~Chris
> --
> Chris Maden, text nerd <URL: http://crism.maden.org/ >
> “If you’ve been a man o’ action, though you’re lying there in traction,
> You will gain some satisfaction thinkin’, ‘Jesus, at least I tried.’”
> — Andy M. Stewart (1952–2015), “Ramblin’ Rover”
>
>
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--
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
Docbook FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk
