RE: Discussion Topics Re-Revisited

[Betty Harvey <ebxml@eccnet.eccnet.com>]

On Thu, 25 May 2000, Duane Nickull wrote:

> Hi Betty:
> 
> The example John gave was not meant to be a complete ebXML message,  only to
> raise a point of conversation regarding each element having a way to point
> back to a repository Data Element.   We would not do this in the XML
> document instance, it would be done within the accompanying DTD or possibly
> Schema.

Duane:

	I am confused by your comment that "We would not do this in the
XML document instance, it would be done within the accompanying DTD or
possibly Schema".

	If you look at the original example:

                             Document 1
<FOOD id="559849JUE98">
            <FRUIT id="39408JEX98"> apple</FRUIT>
</FOOD>       

The DTD snippet would look something like this:

<!ELEMENT FOOD (FRUIT | VEGETABLE | WHATEVER)>
<!ATTLIST FOOD
          id    CDATA  #FIXED "5559849JUE98">

<!ELEMENT FRUIT (#PCDATA)>
<!ATTLIST FRUIT
          id  CDATA #FIXED "39408JEX98">

What happens if you are ordering Apples and Oranges and the
distributor is the same but the suppliers are different.  I
don't understand how you can resolve the conflict.

> 
> I think that using the namespcaes such as your example is certainly alot
> more robust.  We haven't yet decided an the actual syntactical (spelling?)
> method yet.
> 
> What John was striving at is that each element will have a way to reference,
> via a unique ID, an XML file in a repository which caontains all the
> pertinant metadata about that element.

I am not advocating namespaces unless they actually get resolved.
I 'personally' think they are nebulous at the moment but see their
potential.

Betty

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Betty Harvey                         | Phone: 301-540-8251 
Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. |        410-787-9200 FAX: 9830
harvey@eccnet.com                    | Washington,DC SGML/XML Users Grp
URL:  http://www.eccnet.com          | http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/
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