RE: [xtm-wg] XTM Requirements

[Steve Pepper <pepper@ontopia.net>]

At 16:10 30.06.00 +0100, Peter Jones wrote:
>>Won't having fixed coord numbers in a given map risk
>>privileging certain views?

I agree.

This discussion is about style sheets. I believe topic
maps should represent abstractions only. We don't want to
"contaminate" them with presentational or other processing
information because, as you say, that would privilege
certain views.

Having said that, Jack does have a valid point: There are
situations in which it would be useful to have a standardised
way of expressing presentation semantics. I can imagine a
tool which allows the user to set certain display parameters
interactively (e.g. which icons to use to display which topic
types, which colours to use for the arcs representing binary
associations of a certain type, etc.) and then save those
parameters as preferences in a style sheet. If the syntax
of that style sheet were standardised it could be interchanged
between applications. Very useful.

This is what DSSSL was designed to do for SGML, and what XSL
does for XML.

However, at this point in time, we should concentrate on getting
an XML representation of the *abstraction* out of the door. We
can perhaps start gathering requirements related to presentation,
but I think we have a very long way to go before we're anything
like ready to create a useful, general solution to this problem.
Just the fact that my examples introduce two display attributes
shows that Jack's requirements are only the tip of an iceberg.

Steve

--
Steve Pepper, Ontopia AS (+47 908 27246)


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