Inheritance/defaulting of attributes

[akirkpatrick at ims-global.com]

Firstly, I thought Paul's little essay on subclassing and inheritance
in DTDs was fascinating.

Re the question below from Rick: as I understood Paul, if an element
inherited a content model, it could define a more restrictive model for
itself but still had to be valid according to the parent model (see   
below).

The question I have is about restricting the use of generic elements in   
the
instance. For example, suppose we have:

<!ELEMENT para (#PCDATA | inline | block)*>
<!ELEMENT inline (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT block (para+)>

<!ELEMENT title TYPEOF para (#PCDATA | inline)*>

<!ELEMENT filename TYPEOF inline>
<!ELEMENT emphasis TYPEOF inline>
...

<!ELEMENT admon TYPEOF block (title?, para+)>
<!ELEMENT note TYPEOF admon>
<!ELEMENT tip TYPEOF admon>
..
(look familiar?)

How do we stop the authors actually using <inline> and <block> which
have little meaning as they are? Do we need a "pure virtual" syntax
which indicates that an element type cannot be instantiated in the
instance?

Either way, I like this idea a lot. Does the instance syntax proposal for
XML take any of this into account? If so, I might be converted, on the
assumption that this type of thing won't make it into the SGML revision.

Alfie.

 ----------
From:  ricko at allette.com.au
Sent:  Thursday, October 09, 1997 4:10 PM
To:  xml-dev at ic.ac.uk; Kirkpatrick, Alfie
Subject:  Re: Inheritance/defaulting of attributes

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------  
 --
Has anyone come up with a good solution for what order element
types can be in if you have inheritance?

<!ELEMENT cat  (head, whiskers, paw+, tail)>
<!ELEMENT kitty  (cry) INHERITS cat>

is all very well, but what is the resulting content model?
It sounds like people expect it to be (using the SGML "&"
connector, which is not in XML):

<!ELEMENT kitty (( head, whiskers, paw+, tail ) & cry )>
   

which is not very satisfactory IMHO.

Rick Jelliffe

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