[PP-main] XML wierdness

[Joakim Ziegler]

On Fri, Mar 10, 2000 at 10:16:13AM +0930, Nick Lothian wrote:

>> XML wierdness
>> -------------

>> The use of XML seems not to be very controversial. I suggest, though,
>> that we stick to vanilla XML without any of the cool add-ons that the
>> W3 delights in cooking up (XPath, XLink, XPointer, XML namespaces,
>> RDF, schemas, DOM, XSL, etc). I've looked at all these and feel that
>> the benefits derived don't quite justify the added complexity.
 
> I was thinking about this yesterday, when I was re-reading the avagato
> story. Someone (was it Alan Cox?) said they would want to support
> syndication of things like softwear check-in logs. I suddenly realized we
> could support that by having nested XML - we have our XML DTD, with a (say)
> <STORY> </STORY> tag which contains the syndicated data - which can be in
> any valid XML DTD - so we can syndicate stuff that has formating, or some
> other DTD that is a software bug report, for instance. This required
> namespaces (doesn't it? - I have to admit I don't follow the XML standards
> to closely)

Actually, this not only requires namespaces, this more or less *is* XML
namespaces. And I think this is quite handy for unusual payloads.

However, defining this to be undefined, as this is basically suggesting,
doesn't solve anything. We still need some common format for the thing I
suspect will be the first and primary exchange data, news stories. So we need
to define a DTD for that as well, if no suitable one exists. There's no
getting around it, just as there's no getting around that participating fully
in Peer Press will require change in the guts of the participating sites'
systems.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - simplemente r&d director - joakim at simplemente.net
 FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
      http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.simplemente.net/