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John Cowan | 1 Jul 2012 01:17

Re: "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic principles of MicroXML"

Rushforth, Peter scripsit:

> Please vote (*in order*).

This all seems to me nothing more than a vast to-do about whether
a general-purpose href attribute ought to be xlink:href or xml:ref.
I cannot take the question seriously.  "Parturient montes, nascetur
ridiculus mus."

--

-- 
We call nothing profound                        cowan <at> ccil.org
that is not wittily expressed.                  John Cowan
        --Northrop Frye (improved)

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David Lee | 1 Jul 2012 02:02

RE: "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic principles of MicroXML"

IMHO  ... risking offence by overstepping my bounds ... I think it's a bit forward to insist that particular
people vote on a suggestion of this nature in this forum.  This forum is about open discussions not forcing
an agenda.  I would think attempting to force a vote and naming individuals would be in the providence of a
standards body not a discussion forum.

----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee <at> calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan <at> ccil.org] On Behalf Of John Cowan
> Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2012 7:18 PM
> To: Rushforth, Peter
> Cc: David Carlisle; Len Bullard; xml-dev <at> lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic
> principles of MicroXML"
> 
> Rushforth, Peter scripsit:
> 
> > Please vote (*in order*).
> 
> This all seems to me nothing more than a vast to-do about whether
> a general-purpose href attribute ought to be xlink:href or xml:ref.
> I cannot take the question seriously.  "Parturient montes, nascetur
> ridiculus mus."
> 
> --
> We call nothing profound                        cowan <at> ccil.org
> that is not wittily expressed.                  John Cowan
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Liam R E Quin | 1 Jul 2012 02:50
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RE: "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic principles of MicroXML"

On Sat, 2012-06-30 at 08:13 +0000, Rushforth, Peter wrote:

> 
> [...] I notice that James has not entered this discussion.

I think he's otherwise occupied right now.

> Voting rules: Votes shall be cast in the following order James Clark,
> Michael Kay, Tim Bray, then everyone else.

Then I won't vote, but I'm not sure a "celebrity consensus" would be
very useful or interesting.

In any case it's not going to be a "binding vote" on the W3C XML Working
Group, nor are you likely to get the people you've chosen to make a W3C
Working Group, even if W3C worked that way.

The person you'd actually have to persuade is watching the thread. Some
of the business questions might include...

* Which companies or organizations would pay to join W3C to do the work?

* Who would implement new the spec?

* Who would use it?

* What business problems would be solved?

* What would be the impact on the existing deployed XML base?
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David Lee | 1 Jul 2012 17:01

RE: "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic principles of MicroXML"

John Cowan Sez ...
> This all seems to me nothing more than a vast to-do about whether
> a general-purpose href attribute ought to be xlink:href or xml:ref.
> I cannot take the question seriously.  "Parturient montes, nascetur
> ridiculus mus."

My take is a little more serious.  If an attribute is part of the xml namespace then there is a presumption that
all consumers of "XML" understand and apply the semantics.  I would think it would be a "must do".  But
putting an attribute in another namespace makes it a "do if you want to support that thingy".   I think this is
a big difference.
Therefore I am on the side of minimal amounts of attributes in the xml namespace ... OTOH I do understand the
desire to put more in so that one could count on all consumers understanding and enforcing the semantics. 
But that's the rub with this suggestion, IMHO.
Unlike HTML where the intent of the HTML semantics is very tightly bound to presentation in a browser.  XML
(or MicroXML) is not necessarily bound to presentation semantics.  So what does it mean in the general
sense to recognize and support the semantics of href and friends ?
I think that will be a very difficult thing to define and get consensus, and also very difficult to validate
conformance.  Only in certain use cases does it have meaning (even if those are common). This is the big
blocker for me. 

----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee <at> calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org

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John Cowan | 1 Jul 2012 19:11

Re: "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic principles of MicroXML"

David Lee scripsit:

> My take is a little more serious.  If an attribute is part of the
> xml namespace then there is a presumption that all consumers of "XML"
> understand and apply the semantics.  

Not at all.  It's quite common, for example, not to support xml:space,
and there are plenty of document types that use id or something else
rather than xml:id.  The xml:* attributes are there if you need them,
but otherwise have no special status.

> Unlike HTML where the intent of the HTML semantics is very tightly bound
> to presentation in a browser.  XML (or MicroXML) is not necessarily
> bound to presentation semantics.  So what does it mean in the general
> sense to recognize and support the semantics of href and friends ?

Hyperlinking is not about presentation, it's about expressing a relationship
between documents.  For various hysterical raisins, XML-based document types
have most often chosen to use non-generic markup to express hyperlinking.

--

-- 
Note that nobody these days would clamor for fundamental laws        John Cowan
of *the theory of kangaroos*, showing why pseudo-kangaroos are   cowan <at> ccil.org
physically, logically, metaphysically impossible.    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Kangaroos are wonderful, but not *that* wonderful.     --Dan Dennett on zombies

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Andrew Welch | 2 Jul 2012 09:27
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Re: "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic principles of MicroXML"

> Hyperlinking is not about presentation, it's about expressing a relationship
> between documents.  For various hysterical raisins, XML-based document types
> have most often chosen to use non-generic markup to express hyperlinking.

Hyperlinks in html are a programming language instruction to the
browser, rather than a way to model relationships in your data.

What are the hysterical reasons?  (or raisins) :)

--

-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com

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John Cowan | 2 Jul 2012 10:47

Re: "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic principles of MicroXML"

Andrew Welch scripsit:

> What are the hysterical reasons?  (or raisins) :)

Chiefly I think because XLink was slow to come out and was too complicated
to hit the 80/20 sweet spot.  Now we have revised it to do so,
but it's too late.

--

-- 
There is / One art                      John Cowan <cowan <at> ccil.org>
No more / No less                       http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
To do / All things
With art- / Lessness                     --Piet Hein

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David Carlisle | 2 Jul 2012 11:17
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Re: "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic principles of MicroXML"

On 02/07/2012 09:47, John Cowan wrote:
> Chiefly I think because XLink was slow to come out and was too
> complicated to hit the 80/20 sweet spot.  Now we have revised it to
> do so, but it's too late.

The revision is better but I think that xlink still isn't "too late" it
is _wrong_.

The revision means you don't have to specify xlink:type but you still
have to use xlink:href and as such I don't think even the revised
version would have been used in XHTML (and related contexts) even had it
been ready at the time. hyperlinking is central to (X)HTML and so
HTML-specific attribute <a href="..."> <img src="..."> are the right
thing to do. Forcing end users to declare an extra namespace and rename
all the attributes is just wrong.

XML doesn't in general reserve element and attribute names so as to give
language designers using the syntax freedom over naming language
constructs, and that applies just as much to attributes that imply links
as any other.

David

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Michael Kay | 2 Jul 2012 12:25
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Re: "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic principles of MicroXML"

I'm flattered to be included in the list of the great and the good, but 
I really feel I should decline the honour. I've very often in my career 
been elevated above my level of competence, and the result has always 
been failure. When Tim Berners-Lee first articulated his vision of the 
web, a friend of his father Conway asked me for my opinion, and I said 
it was all wishful thinking, far too ambitious, and would never fly.

And in hindsight I think I was right: the probability of success was 
indeed very low. Perhaps that's true of nearly all the projects that 
have radically changed the world: they all had a very low probability of 
success.

A couple of things do seem clear:

(a) if you want to do something radical, it won't take off in the way 
intended unless the cost/benefit is very favourable and the risk very low

[(a') on the other hand, there's just a chance it may take off in a way 
that wasn't intended, but by definition, you can't plan for that]

(b) the chance of something being successful has very little to do with 
its technical merit; asking software engineers to create a standard that 
will dominate the web in five years time is like asking composers to 
write a song that will win the Eurovision song contest. Inviting the 
best composer won't greatly increase your chance of winning.

(c) one of the reasons new technologies often fail is that the best 
ideas get borrowed and incorporated incrementally into old technologies. 
So if you do something really new and worthwhile, its best features will 
appear next week in CSS and HTML5, and then people will think they don't
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Oleg Parashchenko | 2 Jul 2012 14:28
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Re: are the regular expressions over xml structure?

Hello Michael,

On Fri, 29 Jun 2012 13:48:02 +0100
Michael Kay <mike <at> saxonica.com> wrote:

...
> Well, there are certainly cases where it would be nice to match a 
> sequence of nodes that matches some pattern, rather than only matching 
> individual nodes: a generalization of xsl:for-each-group.

Exactly. Thanks a lot for an xslt-style code snipplet and the link to the
positional grouping paper.

Meanwhile, I've remembered a more demonstrative example then h1/p
grouping:

"element(image), element(caption), element(table[some condition])"

an image with the caption and a legend table is to be grouped. In my
xslt stylesheets, the grouping code is far away from readability and
maintainability. That's why I'm looking for a better approach.

> Michael Kay
> Saxonica

--

-- 
Oleg Parashchenko  olpa <at>  http://uucode.com/
http://uucode.com/blog/  XML, TeX, Python, Mac, Chess

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