From patrick@durusau.net Thu May 17 05:43:29 2007 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 07:46:32 -0400 From: Patrick Durusau Subject: DIS 29500 Contradiction of ISO/IEC 26300, part 5 To: Dave Welsh , Doug Mahugh , Frank Farance , Jerry Smith , Jon Bosak , "Levine, Leonard F CIV DISA GES-E" , Norm Walsh , "Lynne A. Price" , Rex Jaeschke , Richard Barber , Robert Weir , Steve Carton , Tim Schoechle , "Mason, James David (MXM)" , Kevin Trainor , Eduardo Gutentag Reply-to: patrick@durusau.net X-Accept-Language: en-us, en X-PMX-Version: 5.2.0.264296 X-ASG-Debug-ID: 1179405792-350e00140000-F3fpwQ X-Barracuda-URL: http://10.10.100.8:8000/cgi-bin/mark.cgi X-Barracuda-Connect: unknown[66.110.197.207] X-Barracuda-Start-Time: 1179405792 X-ASG-Whitelist: Client X-ASG-Orig-Subj: DIS 29500 Contradiction of ISO/IEC 26300, part 5 X-Barracuda-Virus-Scanned: by Barracuda Spam Firewall at insimail.com Greetings! Don't despair! We are nearing the end. I think I can conclude this series in one or two more posts. Hopefully breaking up the discussion into smaller issues will help us move more quickly through this terrain. As you have noted, the issue of "represent in an XML format" is an implicit issue in the prior posts. While it is certainly possible to mimic a binary format in XML, that misses the point that XML is an *interchange* syntax that has little (hopefully nothing) to do with how the information encoded in XML is processed by an application after parsing. Note that the design goals of XML do *not* include defining how an application treats the content of an XML document after parsing the XML. (See 1.1 Origin and Goals, Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fourth Edition) at: http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml-20060816/) For example, the use of sections (as I understand it, subject to correction by those more familiar with DIS 29500) is to encode at the end of a section certain formatting information for a particular portion of the text. The "Primer" (Part 3 of DIS 29500) for example, has two sections for the entire document. In ODF, the same information would be represented using styles. But in both cases, the *information* in question has been captured. How that is represented in an application is really not any business of the XML format. I can state that in the applications that are under development by my employer, Snowfall Software, that while the applications read documents encoded using XML, that the internal representation isn't XML. If you think of a merged structure grove (with a non-SGML property set) you would be fairly close. An interface allows manipulation of the internal representation as though it were in XML but that is an interface issue. We have found there are advantages to that approach when typesetting typographically complex diglots where the input for the diglot may range from several hundred pages to over 1,000. True it is very memory intensive but then any application that micro adjusts line spacing backwards across a diglot of any length to meet typesetting criteria is going to be memory intensive. I don't want to provoke a discussion of implementation choices but merely to point out that should an implementation wish to represent section information for formatting purposes at the end of a section of text, that is certainly possible whether the XML represents the information in that manner or some other. The important thing being that the XML format in question convey the information in question. I hope everyone is having a great day! Patrick -- Patrick Durusau Patrick@Durusau.net Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005 Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!