On Fri, Oct 11, 2002 at 03:09:05PM -0400, Norman Walsh wrote:
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> Some more thoughts about this issue...
>
> 1. Entities should be expanded. If users process
>
> <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "..." "..." [
> <!ENTITY chap1.xml SYSTEM "chap1.xml">
> ]>
> <book>
> ...
> &chap1;
> </book>
>
> They're going to expect the profiling to apply to the content of
> &chap1;, not just the wrapper script. That means this code needs to be
> implemented as an XML process, not a character-stream process. And really,
> I think it needs to be done at the parser level, not in something like flex.
> Though I suppose you could implement a specialty XML parser with flex.
>
> 2. The downside of expanding entities is that is going to become  .
> Is this really a problem? You're not going to edit the profiled content,
> right?
>
> 3. OTOH, I really do want this to happen before validation. That way I can write
>
> <chapter>
> <title condition="print">Print Title</title>
> <title condition="online">Online Title</title>
>
> and have the right thing happen.
On the third hand, you can't load such documents into
a validating editor. You'd have to wait until you process
it with conditions resolved to find out if it is valid. Or
you write a smart validating editor that understands your
conditional syntax, and lets you set the conditions that
apply for a given session. Text outside the conditions
could be dimmed and excluded from validation. Now *that*
is the way to write conditional documents.
What happened to the old method of using <phrase>:
<chapter>
<title><phrase condition="print">Print Title</phrase>
<phrase condition="online">Online Title</phrase></title>
which can be validated?
> 4. That means that losing the <!DOCTYPE declaration is unfortunate.
> But that could be fixed, I think, with a specialty XML parser.
I'm not clear what this means.
> 5. You know, I really want this at the URI level.
>
> <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "..." "...">
> <book>
> ...
> <xi:include
>href="http://localhost/profile/path/to/document.xml?condition='html'"/>
> </book>
>
> Now we're getting somewhere!
Would that be part of XPointer or XInclude?
--
Bob Stayton 400 Encinal Street
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