What is a document?

[Don Park]

Mark,

You quoted me out of context.  The paragraph you quoted was a
reply to the following paragraph which clearly points out that
the context of the discussion was the need for a fragment to
impose constraint on its container:

Written by somebody, I forget who (sorry):
>I wouldn't impose such a limitation myself. Why should the fragment
>'know' anything about its container? (If I understand you correctly -
>and apologies if I don't.) Provided it has its namespace declaration
>then it can in theory exist in any container that will have it.

Mark Birbeck wrote:
>This is different. Surely a fragment's applicability or otherwise comes
>from the schema of the containing document, not the fragment itself?
>Have you some scenarios in mind where the fragment should
>limit where it can appear, rather than a schema or DTD doing that job?

Imagine a repository of XSLT templates which is used by XSL editors
to construct a XSLT document in a top-down fashion.  Select an element
in the source tree and you will see a list of templates that can be
applied.  Most likely not all templates will be appropriate for
insertion.  Note that each XSLT templates are, in fact, XML fragments.
This is an example of constraints an XML fragment might impose on its
container.

Another example is an e-wallet which holds private information.  When
a service requires some bits of information and the owner of the wallet
approves, wallet sends the information in XML.  Requesting service
defines the format it wants dynamically using a format similar to a
form and the wallet injects necessary information as if it was filling
out the form.  If a wire-transfer directions must be sent, it can not
be just dropped into any location in the outgoing message.  While this
problem can be solved in other ways, suppose I find it ideal to have
this 'constraint' encoded into each item in the wallet for
extensibility.  Again, this is an example of constraints an XML fragment
might impose on its container.

Are we in sync?

Best,

Don Park    -   mailto:donpark at docuverse.com
Docuverse   -   http://www.docuverse.com


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