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Alaric B Snell <alaric@a...> proposes: <snip/> > Clearly, this process can be generalised with an extensible lookup > table to allow one to ship a module for web browsers that > allows them to > display, say, directly embedded SVG or RDF (as a graph of clickable > links for nodes and arrows between them or something). > > XHTML itself would be just such a module; so some other > renderer could > find bits of XHTML embedded in it's input document as labels or > something and pass control (via the lookup table) to the > XHTML renderer > for those. > > Thus, the web browser's rendering engine would boil down to > invoking > the correct module for the namespace of the root element and letting > that module handle dispatch to other modules where appropriate. A small nit: you'd want each module handing dispatch handling back to the main "browser rendering engine" when it hit a namespace other than it's own. That way the handling of module lookup would be done in only one place instead of each module... > The hard part for being able to define an extension architecture for > every XML application domain (rendering, searching, etc) is > choosing a > generic API and a general meaning of 'embedding' for that application > domain. Can this in general be done? I'd say "probably". Watching the developments in Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) go by I'd say the likely hood is more than "probably": eg. the JBoss implementation (and likely others?) allows XML definitions of method overrides that allow you to change the parameter structure of a method and give you (among other things) the equivalent of multiple inheritance if you need it. > However, expect > problems where people overspecify stuff and accidentally produce > non-extensible module APIs (perhaps something more general > than the CSS > box model is required to base rendering upon. Perhaps XSL-FO would be > better). The rendering issue is separate from the API extension issue, and perhaps harder: I'd guess that you want something more generic such as a than simple boxes, Bezier curves in addition to lines at least?
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