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

[Murray Altheim <m.altheim@open.ac.uk>]

Lars Marius Garshol wrote:

>[...]
> | Although allowing several <topicMap> elements as children in a
> | larger DTD seems quite a weird concept to me ... but weird DTDs do
> | exist :))
> 
> I think there might be legitimate reasons for doing such things, and
> it would in any case be poor specification design if we disallowed
> something we weren't absolutely sure would be an error.


I disagree. 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!

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

      In the evening
      The rice leaves in the garden
      Rustle in the autumn wind
      That blows through my reed hut.  -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu