an unfilled need

[David Megginson]

Brendan McKenna writes:

 > I would say that that depended on the application.  However, a
 > 'general' XML browser -- in the sense that Netscape or IE are
 > 'general' HTML browsers -- would need to be able to discover a
 > means of validating the document -- whether it's one or more
 > Schema's or DTD's is irrelevant -- and a stylesheet for displaying
 > it, or take some 'appropriate' action (such as displaying the
 > source in a 'raw' form) in the absence of one.

Well, if that's all we need, we've got it already.  Linking to a
stylesheet is already standardized in a W3C Recommendation:

  http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-stylesheet/

The XML 1.0 DOCTYPE declaration provides a crude, per-document schema
link, and once we have other kinds of schemas, we'll probably have a
mechanism for linking to those as well.  If that's all people want
when they talk about "automatic discovery", then we have an easy road
ahead, but it really buys very, very little.  As Brendan rightly
points out, meaning is not only document- but application-specific.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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