Announce: XPDL (was XML is broken)

[Simon St.Laurent]

Rather than whining about XML's inadequacies, I thought that maybe it was
time to remedy them, or to make proposals for doing so.

A first draft of XML Processing Description Language is the current result.
 For the most part, it's a cleaner replacement for the prolog (apart from
the <?xml?> declaration, which should remain there.)  XPDL uses XML syntax
(and eventually RDF) to describe the constraints of a class of documents,
to specify where attribute defaulting and entity values should come from,
what styles are appropriate to the class of a document, and to provide the
usual documentation and extensibility.

This is only a first draft, and as such, is incomplete in some areas and
may be questioned in all.  (RDF being a biggie, but this time I've
explicitly reserved space for it.)  The rules for connecting XPDs (XML
processing descriptions) to particular documents are somewhat vague, but I
have reasonable hopes that this proposal is workable, if a departure from
the current approach.

All comments and suggestions are welcome.  If there is enough interest, I
plan to continue developing this with an open model much like that used for
XSchema and SAX.  This is only a first draft intended to incite discussion.
 It is not a part of any formal standards process.

Details are at  http://purl.oclc.org/NET/xpdl .


Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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