Architectural Form

Fri Apr 24 04:03:04 BST 1998

Pax Prakarsa writes:
 > Hi Dave:
 > 
 > This is about "architectural form". The example below is from your book
 > "Structuring XML documents"
 > 
 > Please help me on the following points.

 > 1. Is there any architectural engine already implemented out there ?

Yes: James Clark's SP set of tools (including the Jade DSSSL engine)
have architectural support:

  http://www.jclark.com/

These don't yet, to my knowledge, support the PI-construct required
for XML, but Eliot Kimber has just announced SP patches from ISOGEN
that do just that.

 > 2. If I want to build one myself, what does it take to build it ? I
 > suppose I can use any XML parser. (or can I ? validating/non
 > validating parser ?). and then build a module that is capable to
 > determine which are the architectural elements ?

It depends on how deeply you want to go.  You can certainly hack
together something very useful with SAX (I am considering doing so
myself some day), but you need to get at the DTD to do complicated
stuff like layered architectures or defaulted values for architectural
attributes.

 > 3. A client document as in your example: page 302-303
 > <doc>
 >     <header>
 >         <doctitle>Title</doctitle>
 >         <byline>Author</byline>
 >         ...
 >         ...
 >     </header>
 >     <body>
 >         ...
 >         ...
 >     </body>
 > </doc>

 > The elements in the above example which are architectural elements
 > are: <doc>, <doctitle>, and <byline>, while the other elements are
 > 'native' elements defined within the DTD for that document.  My
 > question is: can this client document still be validated using the
 > "derived/client DTD", even though it contains a mix of
 > 'architectural' elements and 'native' elements ?

Yes, it can -- the start and end tags of the non-architectural
elements will be ignored, and you can control what happens to their
data and element content.

All the best,

David

-- 
David Megginson                 ak117 at freenet.carleton.ca
Microstar Software Ltd.         dmeggins at microstar.com
      http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/

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