[topicmapmail] Reasons why variant is recursive, and is this really necessary?

[Sam Hunting]

> > Can anyone give me some good examples of where having a variant inside a
> > variant inside a variant, etc might be useful? How many people have used
> > variant recursively like this in their TMs?

I'm not sure that variant is the most successful part of XTM ...

But I can tell you the sort of scenario we had in mind when we were
writing the DTD.  

We envisioned variant names that were platform based. For example, a
variant name (for the same topic, of course) on a Palm might need to be
handled differently from variant names on a cell phone or a browser, and
on a black and white Palm might be a string, and on a color Palm might
even be an icon, and so on. So we envisaged an application traversing down
the tree, collecting parameters, and at the leaf whatever is right for a
platform would display, based on all the accumulated parameters.

Sam Hunting
eTopicality, Inc.

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