Namespaces !

[Peter Murray-Rust]

At 11:14 05/08/98 +0200, Patrice Bonhomme wrote:
>
>I think that XML is really becoming HTML. I though that XML should be "a 
>simplify subset of SGML" but it seems to be like the "Supra HTML 
>recommandation".

No. There are already many applications which have very little resemblance
to HTML. For example WIDL, CDF, XML-Data, DublinCore, RDF, XSL, Chemical
Markup Language, etc. In principle most of these can be managed by
namespaces and (hopefully) compound documents can be created which contain
several of them.

Also, XML is a metalanguage - HTML is not. XML allows the extension and the
specification of an indefinitely large set of applications of which XHTML
(of whatever flavour) is simply one. An important one - which is why we
frequently post examples of it.
>
[...]

>We could also put the Element declaration (content model, attribute list 
>declaration) as a set of "ghost" attributes within the element itself :
>
><P xml:cm="#PCDATA A ACRONYM APPLET B BASEFONT BDO BIG BR BUTTON CITE CODE
DFN 
>EM FONT I IFRAME IMG INPUT KBD LABEL MAP OBJECT Q S SAMP SCRIPT SELECT SMALL 
>SPAN STRIKE STRONG SUB SUP TEXTAREA TT U VAR" xml:attlist="ID ID #IMPLIED; 
>LANG NAME #IMPLIED; etc..."> ... Funny, no ?

Although XML-DEV is open to any new ideas I predict you won't get an
immediate enthusiastic response from the XML-WG to this suggestion. There
are lots of possibilities that the WG has considered and some of them may
be replayed here. But I think they have already proposed other ways of
accomplishing this.

	P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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