Re: XPDL (was Re: XML is broken)

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 4:00 PM -0400 4/6/99, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

>That's pretty much what an XPDL file looks like, with hrefs pointing to all
>sizable chunks of information.  It's not a manifest for a particular
>document (it's referenced by the document, rather than it referencing the
>document), but that functionality wouldn't be difficult to add for
>particular use-cases.
>

I really wonder about this approach. It strikes me that the document should
be the document, and all this differet information should come from outside
of it. I really don't like the idea of embedding even a simple link to the
XPDS stuff inside the document. I guess I'm prejudiced here based on my
experience with style sheets where <?xml-stylesheet?> has caused me nothing
but trouble. I hate having to edit my documents to apply a different style
sheet, especially when I frequently want to switch between more than one
style sheet for a single document.

What about using a standard naming convention for attaching XPDL info to
documents? Or HTTP headers? Possibly but not necessarily backed up by a
processing instruction, where the processing instruction has the lowest
priority?  My fundamental problem here is that I view this as a sort of
layered approach, and I don't want the lower layers (XML) to have any
knowledge of the upper layers (XLL, XSL, XPDL, etc.)


+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|        XML: Extensible Markup Language (IDG Books 1998)            |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764531999/cafeaulaitA/   |
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|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://sunsite.unc.edu/javafaq/ |
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