Re: [relax-ng] Conversion of comments between the compact and the XMLsyntax

[Eric van der Vlist <vdv@dyomedea.com>]

On Wed, 2003-01-29 at 14:49, James Clark wrote:
> > I don't know if there is a real need for this or if it's purely
> > "academical" but I stumbled on this issue while presenting workarounds
> > for people who would absolutely need to annotate "value" or "param"
> > patterns and comments are one of them.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to workaround.  You can
> annotate param (or value) patterns:
> 
> xsd:string {
>   ## a pattern
>   pattern = "xyzzy"
> }
> 
> turns into:
> 
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <data type="string" xmlns="http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0";
> datatypeLibrary="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-datatypes";>
>   <param name="pattern">xyzzy</param>
>   <a:documentation>a pattern</a:documentation>
> </data>
> 
> Do you mean you want to be able to annotate particular characters with a
> param or value? If so, why?

It seems to me that the annotation should be included in what is
described (especially if you want to extract documentation) and that if
I want to document a complex regular expression within a pattern, the
annotation should be included in the "pattern" element rather than
following it.

Using the XML syntax, since I can't write:

 <param><xxx:doc>blah</xxx:doc>xyzzy</param>

I have two solutions left:

 - Use a foreign attribute:
 <param xxx:doc="blah">xyzzy</param>

 - Use a comment:
 <param><!-- blah -->xyzzy</param>

If the comment doesn't stay at the same location after a roundtrip
through the compact syntax it means that this is not a reliable
workaround.

Eric

PS: Comments are so much easier to read than annotations with the
compact syntax that it's a documentation system which deserves some
consideration with Relax NG!
-- 
Freelance consulting and training.
                                            http://dyomedea.com/english/
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Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
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