From owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org Mon Jun 4 16:13:28 2007 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:11:55 -0400 From: Patrick Durusau Subject: INCITS-V1: Procesing models and XML Sender: owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org To: incits-v1@incits-v1.org Reply-to: incits-v1@incits-v1.org X-Accept-Language: en-us, en X-PMX-Version: 5.2.0.264296 X-ASG-Debug-ID: 1180998770-18ac00120000-E618Iy 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: 1180998770 X-ASG-Whitelist: Client X-ASG-Orig-Subj: Procesing models and XML X-Barracuda-Virus-Scanned: by Barracuda Spam Firewall at insimail.com Greetings! I have been thinking about processing models and XML generally and XML based office formats in particular over the weekend. (Little else to do while waiting on parsers and documentation generators.) When I say "XML based office formats" I immediately think in terms of document models. That is to say that an XML format enforces a particular model for some given class of documents. But, I have come to think that view of XML implies something else. That is it also implies a processing model in addition to the document model. Although I have long argued that XML is an *interchange* syntax and has nothing to do with how an XML file is processed after receipt, that is sadly (in my view) not really true for most XML based applications. That is to say that well-formedness and validity are measures to insure interchange and not how the document will be processed by some particular application. Let's take a fairly neutral illustration to make that point: In OOXML, section information appears at the end of a "section" with additional formatting information. If you look at the XML source for the Primer (Part 3) you will find that it has only two sections for an almost 500 page document. In ODF, I can replicate the same information using styles but then that information is stored in a stylesheet. That is to say the informational content is the same but the logic of the applications to use that information is completely different. In OOXML, the application is expecting the "section" information to appear at the end of the text stream of markup. In ODF, the application is expecting the "section" information in a stylesheet and applies it to the content with that as an associated style. What I am saying poorly is that what OOXML represents is XML to support a different processing model (indeed even a different document model) than what we are accustomed to seeing in XML. That is not to say that OOXML isn't being processed as XML, it certainly is, but the underlying document model supports a particular processing model for that content. A different processing model in markup would not work with applications with that processing model. I am still searching for a way to describe the XML document model in OOXML. Arbitrary really doesn't work because it is not wholly unconstrained. Granular doesn't work either as other schemas have granular markup in addition to more traditional structures. This really isn't an issue for V1 but from a theoretical pespective I would find it helpful to be able to locate it within a class of schemas that share common characteristics. (Other than being used by MS. ;-) An interesting characteristic but not one that helps with theoretical analysis.) Hope everyone is at the start of a great week! Patrick PS: Joseph responded offlist to point out that I was eliding over the "3" in several schema file names in my quest to build the ur schema. ;-) Auto-correction by your eyes is a nice feature but sometimes, like all features, it can be a bug. ;-) -- 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!