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Subject: [geolang-comment] XHTML, PSIs and Nested Identifiers [Was: Montrealminutes posted]
Lars Marius Garshol wrote: > * Mary Nishikawa [...] > | I am not that happy with tables. The structure should be as simple > | as possible. > > I'm not too happy, either, but it's a bit difficult to think of a good > alternative. The alternative would be to repeat for each code > something like > > "The geographical region indicated by ISO 3166 codes 'XX', 'XXX', > and 'YYY' with the name 'Zzzzzzzz' in English and 'Qqqqqqq' in > French." > > We could do that, but a table seemed simpler and more reader-friendly. > Opinions and suggestions are much welcome, however. The way I've looked at this previously (ie., how to effectively use XHTML as a publishing media for PSIs), is to wrap the PSI-definition content in XHTML that is in effect ignorable, such that one could rely on *any* particular form of XHTML markup being suitable, with its use being specifically to containerize-and-identify each PSI definition. One still should be creating valid XHTML markup, unless one wanted to extend the XHTML markup language (which can be done fairly easily (I might volunteer -hint) as well using the W3C Recommendation "Modularization of XHTML" [XHTMLMOD]). In your example, the table row element <tr> would likely contain the ID attribute for the PSI so that *it* was the target of queries. This would mean that browsers that haven't followed the rules set back with HTML 4.0 from 1997 wouldn't have the link followed correctly (ie., older browsers only linked to "#foo" by looking for a <a name="foo">, not <tr id="foo">). But the benefit of this is that clever authors could include individual IDs for each language (if one wanted each language to have its own unique ID) with a parent ID for the entire set of languages for that PSI. This idea of nested identifiers could be quite powerful, in that an XPath query on the parent would return a *set* of identifiers, and vice-versa: a query on an ID could travel up to find out any available parent IDs, making this a means of establishing a taxonomy of PSIs, in XHTML. With use of the 'xml:lang' attribute as allowed in XHTML, tools could do some interesting things with this, such as visualization. Since these tables would in most instances be machine-generated I don't see much in the way of barriers to this due to markup or processing complexity. The resulting table in any case would hide from the reader any of its complexity, which is only there for machine processing. Probably some indicator in the document <head> (a <meta> element) should indicate via URI or URN that it contains a PSI definition set. Coupling this with my Metadata in XHTML draft (ie., putting <meta> elements within the tables) makes this even cleaner, markup-wise. If tables are really considered abhorrent (though I think honestly that the specific choice of XHTML markup should be considered rather irrelevant so long as it fulfilled some containership and ID rules) you could use definition <dl> lists. Downside of this is that the design of this (going back to HTML 2.0) is pretty stupid: the <dd> definition *follows* the <dt> term. It'd been much more intelligent to have the definition contained by it, but it's a bit too late for that kind of change... Murray [XHTMLMOD] Modularization of XHTML, W3C Recommendation, Murray Altheim, et al., 10 April 2001 See: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xhtml-modularization-20010410 see also: [XHTML11] XHTML™ 1.1 - Module-based XHTML, W3C Recommendation, Murray Altheim, Shane McCarron, eds. 31 May 2001. See: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11 [AMX] Augmented Metadata in XHTML, Neocortext.Net Working Draft Murray Altheim, Sean Palmer, 10 May 2002 See: http://www.altheim.com/specs/meta/NOTE-xhtml-augmeta.html ...................................................................... Murray Altheim <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/> Knowledge Media Institute The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK If it wants to be a global power and a player in the Atlantic alliance, Europe has to get back into the business of making war. -- Newsweek Magazine, June 3, 2002
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