[dsdl-comment] thoughts on Part 8

Dear DSDL folks,

I have the following comments regarding the 2002-11-26 draft of DSDL
Part 8. I hope that these comments are helpful and not too far off the
mark, since I'm still a DSDL newbie. As I discussed with Ken Holman, Jim
Mason, and others at XML 2002 last December, I am interested in
contributing to Part 8 (as my schedule permits).

1. I think the Architectural Form Definition Requirements (Annex A.3)
from ISO/IEC 10744:1997 should be normatively referenced, and I think
the scope should explicitly say that Part 8 is a DSDL-friendly and
XML-friendly repurposing of the SGML/HyTime architectures mechanism as
originally specified in the AFDR.

2. I think that the title of Part 8, "Declarative Document
Manipulation", is too limiting. The "manipulation" aspect of
architectural forms is more a means to an end than the end itself. As I
see it, the key purpose of AF is to provide backwards-compatible way to
reuse pre-existing markup vocabularies, even if the pre-existing
vocabulary was not originally designed with reuse in mind (this differs
from the OO paradigm where you are required to design from the get-go
with reuse in mind). I would prefer as a title for Part 8 something like
"Flexible Schema Reuse".

3. I like the proposal to specify the architecture and how it is used
(I'm using AFDR terminology here) in the form of an XML document using
XPath expressions to refer to elements and attributes in documents using
the architecture. I agree that ease of implementation in XSLT should be
a goal and that XPath functionality that is hard to implement in a
streaming manner (such as id and key) should be avoided.

4. In addition to supporting element/attribute renaming and
supression/addition of markup/content, Part 8 should support the
derivation of attribute values from content and vice versa.

5. I don't understand the fifth principle in clause 6 (Vocabulary),
"allow for aliasing the namespace of the content to be added to the
output information set". Could someone provide an example?

Best regards,
Josh

-- 
Joshua Lubell
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263
Gaithersburg MD 20899-8263, USA
Phone: 1-301-975-3563, Fax: 1-301-975-4694
Email: lubell@nist.gov
--
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