[sc34wg3] CTM draft dtd. 2007-09-09 - Templates

[Lars Heuer]

Hi Steve,

[...]
> Furthermore, the kind of situation you describe only arises if the CTM
> author carelessly uses an existing identifier as a template name, which is
> asking for trouble anyway. We could avoid this if template names and
> identifiers were not allowed to overlap.

Yes, I thought about distinct template names and topic identifiers,
but I don't think that it is a good solution: The template names have
to be known a priori before a parser can detect that there is an
overlap, which seems to be hard since the user can define a template
everywhere.

And distinct template names and topic identifiers wouldn't help if the
document contains a typo:

     def homepage($owner, $iri)
         has-homepage(owner: $owner, website: = $iri)
     end

     mccartney
        hompage: http://www.mccartney.com/


Here a CTM parser wouldn't complain that the template 'hompage' does
not exists, and creates a silently an occurrence of type 'hompage' with
the corresponding IRI value.

If we'd use a different syntax, a parser can react on such errors and
aid the user.

Best regards,
Lars
-- 
http://www.semagia.com