A processing instruction for robots

[Walter Underwood]

At 10:12 PM 12/3/99 -0800, Don Park wrote:
>Walter,
>
>Could you elaborate your decision to use PI rather than
>element(s)?

Lars did a pretty good job, but I'll elaborate anyway.

This is information for a specific kind of XML processor
(an indexing robot), but it is not specific to the document
type. So we need a mechanism that applies to any XML document
and can be automatically ignored by non-robot processors.
A PI is an exact fit. Even the name is right -- it is an
instruction to the robot about how to process it.

The alternative, adding an element to every DTD in the 
universe, with the corresponding breakage to every processor
that reads those DTDs, is just too awful to contemplate.

wunder
--
Walter R. Underwood
wunder at infoseek.com
wunder at best.com (home)
http://software.infoseek.com/
http://www.best.com/~wunder/
1-408-543-6946

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