Last Call issued on initial stylesheet linking draft

[Liam R. E. Quin]

With respect to http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-xml-stylesheet-19981001 ...


This mail has (1) a general plea, followed by some numbered
suggestions/corrections to the draft.

<Plea>
It seems to me that the mechanism for linking between an
XML document and a style sheet is exactly the same as linking
between an XML document and its DTD or Schema, and exactly
the same as linking to a namespace, or to a related image,
or almost any other link.

I think the processing instruction is unfortunate: XLink should
be used.  If XLink is not powerful enough to do this, fix it.
If XLink is too complex to do something this simple, fix it.

If XLink should be replaced by or (as I suspect) merged with RDF,
fine, use RDF.  Style and behaviour/Action sheets are in many
ways very similar to the schema definitions one might expect to
find at the other end of a Namespace URI, too.

Tim (or the group for whom Tim posted) clearly realised the
inadequacy of the processing instruction synrax, as the message
was mostly an apology for using it.

Please reconsider.
</plea>

<Suggestions>

If you go ahead with the draft as it stands,

[1] please can you add an example of right-to-left text in a
    style sheet title, and show how to indicate the language?
    That isn't clear to me.

[2] there is an implication in the productionPseudoAttValue[3]
    that general entity references to the five predefined internal
    general entities are to be expanded inside the text of
    processing instructions.  This is not part of XML 1.0 behaviour
    (see Section 2.6 in XML 1.0, where the content of a processing
    instruction is simply
    [16] PI ::= '<?' PITarget (S (Char* - (Char* '?>' Char*)))? '?>') 
    with no allowance for entity references to be understood (although
    they are not forbidden).

    The "Associating Stylesheets with XML documents" draft needs to
    say whether this new treatment of processing instructions is
    2a) not the case -- &lt; is simply the 4 characters &, l, t, ; inside
	a processing instructihons, as now;

    2b) undefined, as with the present draft (i think through oversight)

    2c) optional depending on the processor

    2d) required in <?xml-stylesheet...> PIs but forbidden, optional or
	undefined elsewhere

    2e) required retroactively in all conforming XML software in all PIs

    2f) some other interpretation

    I'm listing the obvious interpretations to show why it needs to be
    clarified.

[3] please can we avoid the normative reference to html 4.0 in the
    first paragraph of section 1?  It might make it harder for a future
    version of html to be based on xml, as you'd end up with a circular
    dependency :)  I don't think this is a big deal, though, and I
    don't think the other references to html 4 matter as much, if at all.
    I'd prefer to see a note that pointed out the similarity, and then
    a duplication of the appropriate text, I think.

[4] in production [2], the space should be S? I assume, as should the
    trailing one in production [1] -- none of the examples match the
    grammar as it stands.

[5] can the style sheet have an associated language?  Does that make sense??

[6] Finally, give an example of a Link: header to make the mapping clear.

</Suggestions>

I hope these comments help.


Lee

-- 
Liam Quin, GroveWare Inc., Toronto;  The barefoot programmer
l i a m q u i n     at    i n t e r l o g    dot   c o m
irc.technonet.net::ankle5    irc.dal.net::ankle{MD}


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