From: Jim Dabell (jim-blogite@jimdabell.com)
Date: Sat Sep 07 2002 - 19:18:52 BST
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On Saturday 07 September 2002 5:10 pm, Simon Willison wrote:
> At 17:59 07/09/2002 +0000, Jim Dabell wrote:
> >I prefer mine, sorry :). The "priority" that I used in my suggestion
> > was inspired by dns/mx priorities - start with the lowest number (if
> > two methods are equal, decide by yourself), and if one fails (or you
> > can't implement it for any reason), move on to the next method, until
> > you find one that works. I'm not sure if that was clear or not, or if
> > you just don't think it's useful.
>
> Aah, I was a bit confused on that detail - thanks. I'm slightly
> uncomfortable with the idea of attributes with numbers in being used to
> define priority - information like that seems to me to be crying out to
> be represented by the structure of the XML document (half the fun of XML
> is the fact that it lets you build up weird and wonderful hierarchical
> representations).
That's another approach, definitely. I suspect it will lead to lots of
nested elements in practice though, and perhaps the simplest method is the
best here.
On the other hand, you can specify things with your method that would be
awkward with mine, giving "paths" through certain fallbacks. For instance,
with the following structure:
<interface id="a" priority="high">
<fallback id="c" />
</interface>
<interface id="b" priority="low">
<fallback id="d" />
</interface>
You could specify that you prefer a, followed by c, followed by b, followed
by d, in effect, grouping the elements logically (e.g. the first group is
automatic, the second group is manual). It's possible with my method, but
I think yours may be clearer, I'm not sure.
> > > One potential problem with the above is that interface details are
> > > contained as a single block of CDATA.
> >
> >I'm not quite sure what you mean - you mean the URL etc are free-form,
> >instead of as an attribute? I agree, I don't particularly like it, but
> > I thought that was just because I am used to html hrefs.
>
> I'm fine with using CDATA when there's only one bit of information to
> display, my objection was that once you have more than one piece of
> information (like an email address and subject) you're stuck - CDATA only
> really lets you represent one bit of data.
Ahh... gotcha. I understand now :)
- --
Jim Dabell
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQE9ekMR3tJNldoQhi8RAvZNAJ47wL+PU17xircCJmF6L+9XPi84fQCgwYsi
CIWLaVaqyJBVJOYhlPgoYWM=
=7yTI
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Message sent over the Blogite mailing list.
Archives: http://www.aquarionics.com/misc/archives/blogite/
Instructions: http://www.aquarionics.com/misc/blogite/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Sep 07 2002 - 19:05:01 BST