[Zope] AW: [Zope] Thoughts on XMLishkindasorta things
Carsten Oberscheid
co@daisybytes.su.uunet.de
Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:51:24 +0100
[Christopher Petrilli]
>
> Yes I'm being vague, lest the XMLnazis breat me up again...
^^^^^
(can we blame _this_ on the wine? :-| )
>
> Anyway, so I've MOSTLY got the 'store' feature working, and here's how
> I'm trying to do it...
>
>
> * Create new tag 'store', used like this:
>
> <?ztml store var foo ?>
>
I'm glad you liked this one (see below) :^)
>
> * Introduced the concept of a parameter entity into the parser, which
> has its own table for management, seperate (for future use! :-)
>
> For those unfamiliar with XML things, a parameter entity is actually
> slightly different than a regular entity (character entity)... it's
> formed thusly:
>
> %ztml;
>
> Note the use of the '%' character, rather than the '&' character. My
> reading of the standard says that this is the correct use, not the
> regular character entity (&ztml; was the proposed one).
>
I'm sorry, you got this wrong. Parameter entities can only be used in the DTD,
while character entities are to be used in the document. Using a character
entity is the right way to go.
Anyway, as Amos said, the "store" construct _is_ a hack. And not only for
esthetic reasons I'm not too happy with it myself. But since what you, Chris,
are doing is patching the existing DTML rather than a redesigning it, this
should be an acceptable workaround for the attribute problem.
In the long run, I agree that DTML should evolve to be fully XML compliant. I
don't want to comment on Paul Prescod's XSL-syntax proposal until I know more
about XSL (and reread the discussion he mentioned). Anyway, the DTML engine
_is_ a (pre-)processor, so on first thought it seems quite "natural" to use
PI's here (tempting enough, since these are quite rare animals in Joe Tagger's
boring life :-). On the other hand, XSL and other rendering engines are
processors as well, so... I think I shut up and think about this some more...
Best regards,
.co.
+------------------------------------------------------- daisy bytes! --------+
Carsten Oberscheid
co@daisybytes.su.uunet.de digital document processing
http://www.pweb.de/daisybytes.su electronic publishing