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Dynamic documents revisited
Back in July, when Tim Bray pointed to a best-practices document that the W3C TAG (Technical Architecture Group) gathers periodically in exotic locations to discuss, I was exploring a way of dynamically building views of XML documents in the browser. In a couple of postings (and with some help from Bob Clary) I was able to post a Web page that turned the TAG's Web page into a dynamic outline that can selectively display elements styled as:
- practices
- principles
- constraints
- stories
- acronyms
- ednotes
In addition, it can selectively display:
- internal links
- external links
- paragraphs containing arbitrary text
Here's a new version of that dynamic viewer for the latest revision of the TAG document, which Tim wrote about today. As I review the principles and practices, which my handy-dandy viewer dynamically assembles into tidy lists for me, I'm still not sure which of them accounts for my ability to do this neat trick. I supppose Good practice: Thoughtful URI creation comes closest, except that in this case, it's really more like Thoughtful content creation. Maybe that's covered by the separate note formattingProperties-19: Reuse existing formatting properties/names, coordinate new ones?
I'm also still not quite sure of XHTML's place in the world. Section 4.6.7., Media Types for XML, advises:
Good practice: In general, server managers SHOULD NOT assign Internet Media Types beginning with text/ to XML representations.
The TAG document has a doctype of XHTML 1.0 Strict, and comes over the wire as text/html, but I'm treating it as XML so I can query it with XPath and transform it. I'm not losing sleep over it, but is this a sneaky exploit or a principled technique?
Update: As before, this should work (by slightly different means) in IE 5+ and Mozillas of recent vintage, otherwise not. It is, as the big players like to say, a Technology Demonstration.
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