Comment by dmsnell
5 months ago
HyTime was Kimber’s work, and I found this reflections of his on “worse is better” to be quite refreshing, especially when contrasting the formality of SGML against the flexibility of HTML.
https://drmacros-xml-rants.blogspot.com/2010/08/worse-is-bet...
I’ll have to spend more time in the SGML Handbook. It’s available for borrowing at https://archive.org/details/sgmlhandbook0000gold. So far, I’ve been focused on the spec and trying to understand the intent behind the rules.
> a couple of auxiliary conventions introduced to make attribute capture and mapping in link rules more useful
Do you have any pointers on how to find these in the spec or in the handbook? Some keywords? What I’ve gathered is that notations point to some external non-SGML processor to handle the rendering and interpretation of content, such as images and image-viewing programs.
Cheers!
> Do you have any pointers on how to find these in the spec or in the handbook?
I just checked now, and apart from FSIDR I was mainly referring to DAFE [1], a HyTime 2nd ed. facility actually part of AFDR (archforms) allowing additional attribute capture and mappings in link rules towards a more complete transformation language as SGML's link rules are a little basic when it comes to attribute handling. Note in a HyTime context, transformations (for lack of a better word) are specified by AFDR notations/data attributes in not only a highly idiosyncratic way but also redundantly when SGML LINK is perfectly capable to express those classes of transformations, and more. sgmljs only implements LPD-based transformations (yet with more power such as inheritance of DTDs into type checking of template processing contexts and pipelining) and only the DAFE part of AFDR but not other parts.
[1]: http://mailman.ic.ac.uk/pipermail/xml-dev/1998-July/004834.h... (see also ISO/IEC 10744 - A 5.3 Data Attributes for Elements (DAFE))