[SCL] XML question

[Murray Altheim]

james anderson wrote:
> On Wednesday, Feb 4, 2004, at 18:18 Europe/Berlin, Pat Hayes wrote:
>
>>>>I want to be able to use SCL (in some syntactic form) as markup 
>>>>inside HTML in such a way that it is clearly linked to some 
>>>>particular part of the HTML but is invisible to any browser, ie does 
>>>>not appear visibly on the Web page. Rather in the way that href 
>>>>links are invisible, if you take my meaning.
>>>
>>>it sounds a lot like it should be treated as a scripting language.
>>
>>Yes, excellent suggestion. Thanks for making it.

Except that unless you actually plan to use it as a scripting
language rather than as a means of adding harvestable metadata
to a web page, you really don't want scripting, active scripting,
you want metadata. From your descriptions, I don't think you
want scripting.

> hmm, this is getting to me weeks later. i hope you also saw m.altheim's 
> followup
> (http://philebus.tamu.edu/pipermail/scl/2004-January/000684.html)
> both as to whether SCL really is a script and as to how to type it if 
> it is a script.
> i'm not as certain as he appeared to be that a script element has a 
> clear purpose which would preclude metadata content, but i don't write 
> those specs. for example, is css a script or is it metadata?

CSS is neither, it's stylesheet information, but if you wanted to
press that point, CSS is metadata about a document intended to
provide styling and layout information. It's not a script, and
even industrial-strength stylesheet languages that include some
dynamic transformation features (such as DSSSL or XSL/XSLT) are
not considered as scripting languages, they just have some dynamic
features as necessary to do document transformations necessary for
styling (like adding page numbers, etc.).

Murray

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

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