SAX and delayed entity loading

[John Cowan]

W. Eliot Kimber wrote:

> 1. The same effect can be provided by supertype data content notations
> (using data attributes, which XML doesn't support)

Agreed.

	"Blast and damn [the people who kept data attributes out]!
	May they all suffer from elephantiasis, locomotor ataxy,
	and ingrown toenails!"
		-- _Murder Must Advertise_ (somewhat repurposed)

> 2. having only two levels of typing seems either insufficient or
> unnecessarily limiting.

Not so.  MIME types may have more than two levels, but must have
at least two, and the requirement for creating a new top-level
type is stringent.

> 3. It assumes that the resource is something for which distinctions like
> text or not-text are even relevant.  It may not be, because the data type
> may be entirely abstract (like an SGML architecture or grove construction
> process).

MIME types are a syntax standard: they tell you how to interpret
an octet-stream as something or other: currently, a picture, a sound, a
character stream, a video stream, application-specific data,
a model of a physical object, a message, or an aggregate of
one or more of these things.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan at ccil.org
	You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
	You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
		Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)