Re: [topicmaps-comment] mergeMap Pointing to More Than One topicMapElement

[Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>]

*Murray Altheim

> XTM was designed as an interchange language, not a
> catch-all for all possible "legitimate" topic map expressions.
> Since there is a simple solution for this within the current
> specification, I don't see that opening up the specification
> merely because there *may* be reasons to express something in
> an alternative (and potentially more problematic) way would be
> a benefit for anyone.
>
> It would be poor specification design to allow anything anyone
> can think of merely because they can think of it. It's the
> nature of specification to provide reasonable constraints, and
> XTM as an interchange format has such reasonable constraints. I
> don't want to have to write processors to pull XTM content out
> of ambiguously-marked up XML. What a mess!

I agree with Murray. A DTD is a DTD. You can embed <topicMap> elements, with all their
XTM-like children, inside any kind of XML doc, and process it the way you like, but be
prepared to pay the price, that is poor interoperability. It can't be considered XTM
conformant any more, and you can't ask for XTM processors to make sense of it, nor wait
for XTM specification to tell you what to do in such a case.

Bernard