I leave the first question for Steve Newcomb because he 
is the arch forms expert.   A point about contracts: 
it is a means to constrain a communication and behaviors. 
Without an actual process, there is no sensible answer, 
that is, when the child cites its parents to the 
school teacher, they are using that citation differently 
than they would if they cite it to the parent themselves. 
It is easy with attributes to cite parents, or to use 
#FIXED defaults.  It is having a standard means to 
cite the process or handler (eg, what we did with 
NOTATIONs) that is the problem. 

Yes, a lot of the early works for using SGML to tag 
the windowing tools look the same because in any markup 
language we egenCode (tag the stuff 
we discover) or abstract (create tags for a system 
of abstract entities and relationships).  Many systems for 
that come down to a view/controller sort of paradigm. 
In MID, we just spec'd a way to navigate different 
views given a database.  Not all that revolutionary 
because it looks like any system of containers with 
navigational controls.  At the time, DoD already 
had the database standard (87269) and we were 
adding a viewing tool.   The dilemma is  
getting a portable definition of the behaviors.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@[...].com]

On Thursday 24 January 2002 11:47 am, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>  Steve's message is pertinent.  Maybe XML needs to, as
>  a human does, be able to go in both directions.  That
>  is, a parent constrains the element, but an element should
>  be able to cite its eligible parents.

How is that contract to be obeyed?

>  Packaging the application was what the MID project was
>  about.  There turn out to be (in my experience) only a
>  few solutions if one can bet past arguing over PIs
>  and pointy vs curly brackets.

I'd agree with that. The MID was an interesting application... the 
system I did years ago was similar in some ways to it.

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