[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
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
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [Elist Home]
Powered by eList eXpress LLC