[topicmapmail] Any semantic order to repeatable "or" groups of constructs in XTM?

[Murray Altheim]

Alexander Johannesen wrote:
> Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> 
>> In the OKS we've simply decided that we are not preserving lexical
>> information such as order of topics/associations and so on, and
>> that's that. The thinking behind this has been that topic maps should 
>> be maintained via a user interface rather than in an XML document.
>
> Working mostly with XSLT (which is event-based, not order-based), I
> had no choice in the matter, but my opinion is that it *should* be 
> order- free. The XTM syntax is so verbose and the number of items in it 
> often so many that those factors alone make XTM a nightmare to manually
> edit, and I would say it even promotes people to get a proper tool to
> maintain them instead. If you need order, properties are your friend as 
> you then work on data you *know* instead of the guesswork of the XTM.
> As the spec iteself doesn't require order, to maintain interchangability
> you shouldn't even think in those terms.

As Lars Marius pointed out, the TM/XTM specs don't require it.

But as I pointed out, one must often take into account application
demands and operate accordingly.

As always, good engineering is taking into accounts project
requirements as much as possible, and working around technical
limitations. Specifications are only specifications.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

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