[topicmapmail] Fragmented XTM for web metadata, and some ontology?

[Murray Altheim]

Kal Ahmed wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-06-29 at 12:52, Murray Altheim wrote:
[...]
>>I've not attempted to provide a constraint language (as there are others
>>spending far more time and effort than I'd ever on this problem), I'm
>>concentrating on labeling/typing, which is a necessity in its own right.
>>If if one can label a literal value with an XSD primitive, by extension
>>there's no reason why one couldn't use the same approach to "label" it
>>with a custom datatype, where the PSI points to a bit of XML Schema markup
>>that actually provides that constraint, so *if* an application wished to,
>>it could retrieve that markup and actually perform the constraint checking.
> 
> Yes, that is true and what you suggest would make a good way to solve
> the problem of validating XML content from an XML namespace other than
> the XTM 1.0 namespace. However, the issue for the XTM syntax is the
> PCDATA content model of resourceData which prohibits XML content for the
> element.

I understand that. But Kal, describe for me a reasonable approach to
allowing arbitrary XML in <resourceData> that doesn't completely screw
us in terms of interchange. Once you open that door, there's no closing
it. I just don't see how that would make any sense given that the first
document coming down the pike with unknown markup (or JavaScript code)
is just completely opaque to an application that can't process it, or
worse yet, transparent, i.e., the user doesn't even know what is missing.

I argued this same case to the W3C HTML Working Group for years, where we
had Dave Raggett and others advocating that we do away with having an HTML
DTD at all and just defining things in terms of "tag sets". Had this come
to pass, we'd never had an XHTML DTD at all, just some weird notion of a
well-formed "XHTML" document where one could intermix anything anyone
wanted anytime -- complete freedom, and completely useless to anyone
except monopolists who import and export their own brand of proprietary
markup muck (export "HTML" from MS Word to see what I mean). If you look
at the latest XHTML 2.0 draft [1] you'll see they're still trying to
figure out some way of specifying a language without using a schema.
[okay, I should have wrapped this in <rant>. I just don't want us to go
down that same road.]

Murray

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html
...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                         http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK                    .

        "There's a lot of intelligence out there that you don't
         know if it's true or not."  -- Anonymous US official
         http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3014850.stm