Copyright ©1998, 1999 W3C ( MIT, INRIA, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply.
The XML Fragment Working Group, with this 1999 June 30 Working Draft considers its charter discharged. This is the XML Fragment WG's W3C Working Draft as revised to reflect comments received during Last Call review. This draft is technically ready to go to Proposed Recommendation, but the WG decided to hold at this stage to await some implementation experience and to allow possibly related work in other WGs to progress further before submitting this draft for PR.
The W3C Membership and other interested parties are invited to review the specification and report implementation experience. Please send comments to www-xml-fragment-comments@w3.org ( archive). For background on this work, please see the XML Activity Statement.
In the current document, records of major WG decisions and special review requests are so marked and appear in red. Before this specification is submitted as a PR, all such sections will be deleted and will therefore not appear in the final Recommendation.
No substantive changes are expected in this document; however, as a draft document, it may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use W3C Working Drafts as reference material or to cite them as other than "work in progress". A list of current W3C working drafts can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR .
The XML standard supports logical documents composed of possibly several entities. It may be desirable to view or edit one or more of the entities or parts of entities while having no interest, need, or ability to view or edit the entire document. The problem, then, is how to provide to a recipient of such a fragment the appropriate information about the context that fragment had in the larger document that is not available to the recipient. The XML Fragment WG is chartered with defining a way to send fragments of an XML document--regardless of whether the fragments are predetermined entities or not--without having to send all of the containing document up to the part in question. This document defines Version 1.0 of the [eventual] W3C Recommendation that addresses this issue.
The XML standard supports logical documents composed of possibly several entities. It may be desirable to view or edit one or more of the entities or parts of entities while having no interest, need, or ability to view or edit the entire document. The problem, then, is how to provide to a recipient of such a fragment the appropriate information about the context that fragment had in the larger document that is not available to the recipient.
In the case of many XML documents, it is suboptimal to have to receive and parse the entire document when only a fragment of it is desired. If the user asked to look at chapter 20, one shouldn't need to parse 19 whole chapters before getting to the part of interest. The goal of this activity is to define a way to enable processing of small parts of an XML document without having to process everything up to the part in question. This can be done regardless of whether the parts are entities or not, and the parts can either be viewed immediately or accumulated for later use, assembly, or other processing.
Conceptually, the holder of the complete source document considers a fragment of that document and, using the notation to be defined by this activity, constructs a fragment context specification. The object representing the fragment removed from its source document is called the fragment body. The fragment context specification and the fragment body are transmitted to the recipient. The storage object in which the fragment body is transmitted is call the fragment entity. (In some packaging schemes, the fragment context specification may also be embedded in the fragment entity.) The recipient processes the fragment context specification to determine the proper parser state for the context at the beginning of the fragment and uses that information to enable the XML parser to parse the fragment body. (The terms "sender," "recipient," "transmit," are used throughout this document to describe the process of fragment interchange. It should be noted, however, that there are many feasible and useful scenarios for fragment interchange, and in some cases, the "sender" and "recipient" may be on the same machine, node, system, or network, and may even be the same tool in different guises.)
The challenge is that an isolated element from an XML document may not contain quite enough information to be parsed correctly. The goal of this activity is to enable senders to provide the remaining information required so that systems can interchange any XML elements they choose, from books or chapters all the way down to paragraphs, tables, footnotes, book titles, and so on, without having to manage each as a separate entity or having to risk incorrect parsing due to loss of context.
To accomplish these ends, this Recommendation defines:
This Recommendation enables interchanging portions of XML documents while retaining the ability to parse them correctly (that is, as they would be parsed in their originating document context), and, as far as practical, to be formatted, edited, and otherwise processed in useful ways.
The goal of this activity is to define a way to send fragments of an XML document--regardless of whether the fragments are predetermined entities or not--without having to send all of the containing document up to the part in question. The delivered parts can either be viewed or edited immediately or accumulated for later use, assembly, or other processing; what the receiving application does with the information--and issues involved with the possible "return" of such a fragment to the original sender--is beyond the scope of this activity. While implementations of this Recommendation may serve as part of a larger system that allows for "fragment reuse," the many important issues about reuse of XML text and "concurrent multiple author environments" are beyond the scope of this Recommendation.
The point of the fragment context information is to provide information that is not available in the fragment body itself but that would be available from the complete XML document. Specifically, any information not available from the XML document (which may include an external subset) as a whole (plus knowledge of the location of the fragment body within the document) is out of scope for inclusion in the fragment context information. Such information may well be useful and important metadata in a variety of applications, but there are (or need to be) other mechanisms for handling this information.
This Recommendation considers fragments of XML as defined by XML 1.0 and XML Namespaces . It is explicitly noted that this version of this Recommendation does not take into account work such as that taking place in the XML Schema Working Group; insofar as such work by other currently active working groups places new requirements on a fragment interchange solution, those requirements would be input to a new version of the fragment interchange specification that may become a chartered activity at a later date.
It is also explicitly noted that this Recommendation does not consider interchange of information that is not well-formed XML; in particular, issues specific to the interchange of fragments of SGML (including HTML)--other than such SGML that is, in fact, also well-formed XML--are not within scope of this Recommendation.
This list is sorted "logically" as opposed to alphabetically. In an entry, phrases in parentheses are "optional" modifiers; whether they are used explicitly or not, we are still talking about the same thing for the purposed of this Recommendation.
In this section, numbers in brackets refer to productions in XML 1.0. The following information shall constitute the complete fragment context information (fci) set:
From the above list, the following items affect proper (validating) parsing of the fragment:
The following items, while they cannot affect proper parsing, are usually considered part of the basic, structural XML parse tree:
The following items, while not usually considered part of the basic, structural XML parse tree, are clearly definable pieces of information known or computable by any XML processor that is processing the parent document:
WG consensus decision: (1998/12/09): The WG decided that information such as copyright information and a pointer to the parent document's stylesheet was general metadata that shouldn't be included within the FCI set.
WG consensus decision: (1998/12/09): The WG decided not to allow for a "commenting" feature within the FCS as it was felt this was too subject to potential misuse.
WG consensus decision: (1999/01/06): The WG decided not to allow for an extension mechanism within the FCS since our packaging mechanism can be extended to allow the inclusion of other metadata, but the specification of that is outside the scope of this Recommendation.
WG consensus decision: (1999/01/06): Especially because the XML 1.0 syntax for declarations is difficult to embed within an XML instance, the WG decided not to allow for inline inclusion of internal subset information within the FCS; internal subset information can only be included in the FCS via a reference to an "externalized copy" of the internal subset. Inline internal subset information may be more feasible after the XML Schema WG defines instance syntax for declarations, but this would not make it into version 1.0 of this Fragment Interchange Recommendation.
The previous section defined the logical set of information possible in a fragment context. This section describes the notation in which to express a specific fragment context specification. All information would be optional; how much gets included in any particular fragment context specification is up to the sender and recipient, and how this gets determined is outside of the scope of this Recommendation.
Note
While what gets included in any particular fragment context specification is outside of the scope of this Recommendation, some knowledge of the target application can help determine an appropriate level for the fcs. For example, if the target application is a user agent that will use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to display the fragment, the following information is necessary and sufficient given the current level of CSS selector capability: previous siblings of the fragment body, all ancestors of the fragment body, previous siblings of each of those ancestors, and all attributes on all those siblings and ancestors.
Note
A given fragment context specification need not necessarily provide the ability to specify the complete set of fragment context information described in the previous section. In particular, because the XML 1.0 syntax for declarations is difficult to embed within an XML instance, the specific fragment context specification notation defined by this Recommendation does not allow for inline inclusion of internal subset information within the FCS. Internal subset information can only be included in the FCS via a reference to an "externalized copy" of the internal subset. Inline internal subset information may be more feasible once an instance syntax for declarations is defined, and such may be considered in future versions of the Fragment Interchange specification.
The syntax used is XML itself. In particular, a fragment context specification (fcs) is written as a single root XML element allowing up to five attributes and containing a subtree of other elements (possibly with attributes). The root element (and the element serving as the placeholder for the fragment body) comes from Fragment Interchange namespace, a specific namespace defined by this Recommendation; the contained subtree of elements comes from the namespace(s) of the document from which this fragment comes. For the purposes of exposition in this section, we assume namespace declarations such as the following are in force:
xmlns:f="http://www.w3.org/XML/Fragment/1.0" xmlns="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/DocbookSchema"
That is,
within this example, f
is the local prefix referring to the Fragment Interchange namespace defined by this Recommendation
for fragment-interchange related components, and the default namespace is
that in effect in the parent document at the beginning of the fragment body
in situ.
The element type for the single root element for the fcs
shall be f:fcs
(where f
is whatever namespace prefix
is mapped to the Fragment Interchange namespace).
It allows up to five attributes, each of whose value shall be a URI reference
[RFC 2396]. The attribute
names and the meaning of their values are as follows:
WG Review Note: (1999/03/17): It was suggested that the ref attributes on fcs might make fcs look like an "xlink" element, but xlink does not currently support a single element with multiple references. It isn't clear to the XML Fragment WG that our fcs element needs to be able to be an XLink kind of element, but the WG submits this to the XLink WG as possible input to their requirements consideration. The XML Fragment Chair has brought this issue to the attention of the XLink WG for review to be completed by the end of this Last Call period.
The content of the f:fcs
element shall be a
subtree of elements (possibly with attribute value assignments) from the parent
document's namespace. This subtree shall provide all the structural context
for the fragment body including various information about ancestor and sibling
elements and attributes by mimicking the (relevant) context within this parent
document. No data characters (mixed content) are allowed within the
f:fcs
element. The special empty element f:fragbody
shall
be used to indicate the placement of the fragment body within the specified
context. It has one significant attribute with meaning as follows:
For example, consider a fragment body that consists of listitems
2 and 3 of an orderedlist
(indicated to be enumerated
with arabic numbers by the numeration
attribute on the
orderedlist
element) within the second sect1
within the
first chapter
within the first part
within the
body
of a book
. Assume that the external subset (aka "DTD")
is in the file Docbook.dtd
on the OASIS Open web server, the
parent document is in mybook.xml
on Acme's web server, and that
there need be no internal subset given as part of the fcs. Then the fcs for
this fragment body might look like:
<f:fcs xmlns:f="http://www.w3.org/XML/Fragment/1.0" extref="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/3.0/docbook.dtd" parentref="http://www.acme.com/~me/mydocs/mybook.xml" xmlns="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/DocbookSchema"> <book> <part> <chapter> <sect1/> <sect1> <orderedlist numeration="arabic"> <listitem/> <f:fragbody/> </orderedlist> </sect1> </chapter> </part> </book> </f:fcs>
A formal notation for the fcs
element
used in the examples of the previous section follows. Therein, the following
terms are defined in either the "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0" (XML 1.0) or "Namespaces in XML" (XML Namespaces) Recommendations: NCName,
AttValue, Eq,
S, Attribute, STag,
ETag, EmptyElemTag
, CharData, Reference,
CDSect, PI,
Comment, prolog,
and Misc.
[2] FCSstag ::=
'<'
NCName ':fcs' ((S 'extref' Eq
AttValue) | (S 'intref' Eq
AttValue) | (S 'parentref' Eq
AttValue) | (S 'sourcelocn' Eq
AttValue) | (S
Attribute))* S? '>'
[3] FCSelementContent ::=
EmptyElemTag | STag FCScontent
ETag | FCSfragbody
[4] FCSfragbody ::=
'<'
NCName ':fragbody' ((S
'fragbodyref' Eq
AttValue) | (S
Attribute))* S? '/>'
[5] FCSetag ::=
'</'
NCName ':fcs' S? '>'
[6] FCScontent ::=
(
FCSelementContent |
CharData | Reference
| CDSect |
PI | Comment)*
fragbody
(FCSfragbody) element in the fcs.The fragment Interchange
namespace shall be associated with the following URI: http://www.w3.org/XML/Fragment/1.0
.
In the productions for FCSstag and FCSfragbody, there can be any number of other attribute assignments, all of which are ignored by the fragment context specification processor. Per XML 1.0 compliance, there can be at most one assignment to any given attribute including the specifically mentioned attributes. (Since there is no "and" connector in EBNF, this restriction is difficult to show directly in the EBNF, hence this restriction in prose; however, this prose restriction is normative.)
In the production for FCScontent, the fragment processor can optionally expand any References that it can expand. Then all CDSects, PIs, Comments, remaining References, and CharData (including whitespace, S ) are ignored by the FCS processor.
Note
If a Reference in FCScontent is expanded and the expansion includes element structure, that element structure is considered part of the fcs as it would if it had been included originally in its expanded form in the fcs. However, since expansion of any Reference in FCScontent is optional on the part of the fragment context specification processor, any sender for which such expansion is important should do the expansion when creating the fragment package.
Note
Generally, a fragment context specification document would be the well-formed document consisting simply of the
f:fcs
element (and its contents) with no prolog. However, a prolog is always allowable and might be necessary when some declarations are required to satisfy the Entity declared well-formedness constraint.
Note
Since all of the components in prolog are optional, an FCSelement by itself is an allowable fragment context specification, and this Recommendation does not preclude some packaging scheme from combining an FCSelement along with a fragment body as shown in some of the examples in the section titled Packaging and interchanging fragments and the section titled Examples.
WG Note: (1999/03/17): If one is to be able to specify a well-formed fcs without resorting to XML 1.0 DTD style internal subset declarations, there needs to be a requirement on the XML Schema WG to be able to declare entities within the fcs using instance syntax. The XML Fragment WG chair has sent a message to the XML Schema WG to this effect.
The previous section
formally defines a fragment context specification to be a well-formed XML
document consisting of a single f:fcs
element with optional attributes
and some content. The f:fcs
element's content consists of optional
stuff from the parent document (from which the fragment body is taken) plus
a single f:fragbody
element with optional attributes. The
f:fcs
and f:fragbody
elements come from a namespace defined
by this Recommendation and have certain specific semantics relative to fragment
interchange as defined by this section.
While it is important to be able to package a fragment body with its fcs, it is expected that a general XML-friendly packaging mechanism will be developed by the W3C that would satisfy this requirement. Meanwhile, this Recommendation defines a simple association mechanism that doesn't rely on a packaging scheme. Applications and interchange partners may agree on any packaging mechanism to aid in fragment interchange--this is beyond the scope of this Recommendation.
The fcs document is a well-formed
XML document that (1) provides the fragment context and (2) provides a reference
to the fragment body. Because it is well-formed, existing XML processors can
be used to process fcs documents. To support this fragment interchange Recommendation,
an application must also understand the semantics of the f:fcs
and f:fragbody
elements and their attributes and process accordingly.
Specifically, the fragbodyref
attribute on the
fragbody
element is a URI reference [
RFC 2396] to the fragment body. A fragment-aware processor is expected
to resolve this reference and process the referenced fragment body in the
context specified by the fcs. None of the attributes on the fcs
element have required semantics with respect to fragment processing; they
are provided (optionally) for the application's use at its discretion.
Note
For example, a browser might bring up an fcs document, "expand" the reference to the fragment body (i.e., put a copy of the fragment body in place of the
fragbody
element), and then ignore (e.g., not display) the part of the document that was originally the fcs, thereby displaying (in the proper context) only the part of the document that was originally the fragment body.
Note
The
fragbody
element and itsfragbodyref
attribute are in many ways logically equivalent to an external entity reference or an XLink reference with an "embed" semantic.
WG Review Note: (1999/03/17): The XML Fragment WG requests a specific review of this issue by the XLink WG as a sanity check to ensure that there is nothing in our definition of the fragbody element that would make it incompatible with XLink. The XML Fragment WG chair brought this issue to the attention of the XLink WG for review to be completed by the end of this Last Call period.
The following example shows
the complete set of information relative to interchanging the two listitem
s for the Docbook book mentioned in the
section titled Overview of the fcs.
The parent document, in
~me/mydocs/mybook.xml
on Acme's web server, is a Docbook book document
whose contents is outlined in the first subsection below. The fragment body
of interest consists of listitems
2 and 3 of the orderedlist
(indicated to be enumerated with arabic numbers by the numeration
attribute on the orderedlist
element) within the second
sect1
within the first chapter
within the first
part
within the body
of this book
. The external
subset (aka "DTD") is in the file Docbook.dtd
on the OASIS Open
web server.
The following represents the parent document from which the fragment body in question comes.
<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE book SYSTEM "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/3.0/docbook.dtd"> <book xmlns="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/DocbookSchema"> <part> <chapter><title>The title for chapter one</title> <sect1><title>The title for section one in chapter one</title> <p>The first paragraph....</p> <p>....</p> </sect1> <sect1><title>The title for section two in chapter one</title> <p>An introductory paragraph preceding an ordered list.</p> <orderedlist numeration="arabic"> <listitem><para>This is the first listitem in this ordered list.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>This is the second listitem within the second sect1 of the first chapter within the first part of a Docbook <quote>book</quote> document.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>And this is the next listitem.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>This is the fourth and last listitem.</para></listitem> </orderedlist> <p>Another paragraph....</p> </sect1> </chapter> <chapter><title>More content</title> <p>More chapters, sections, paragraphs, and such....</p> </chapter> </part> </book>
Note that the declaration of the default namespace on the
<book>
tag isn't required for fragment interchange, but is shown
for the purposes of completeness of this example.
The following shows the fragment body in a separate
file ready for interchange. For the purposes of this example, we are assuming
that this is in the file ~me/mydocs/myfrag.xml
on Acme's web
server.
<listitem><para>This is the second listitem within the second sect1 of the first chapter within the first part of a Docbook <quote>book</quote> document.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>And this is the next listitem.</para></listitem>
The following shows what the fcs document might look like for the above parent
document and fragment body. If this were in the file (e.g., myfrag.fcs
), when this file is sent to any recipient with a fragment-aware tool,
that tool should be able to access and process the desired fragment body.
<f:fcs xmlns:f="http://www.w3.org/XML/Fragment/1.0" extref="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/3.0/docbook.dtd" parentref="http://www.acme.com/~me/mydocs/mybook.xml" xmlns="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/DocbookSchema"> <book> <part> <chapter> <sect1/> <sect1> <orderedlist numeration="arabic"> <listitem/> <f:fragbody fragbodyref="http://www.acme.com/~me/mydocs/myfrag.xml"/> </orderedlist> </sect1> </chapter> </part> </book> </f:fcs>
Note that the fragbodyref
value, which
is a URI reference [RFC 2396
], could be a URL, a file name, a MIME content id, etc., depending on
the MIME type of the referenced resource. Also note that the parentref
value above is only there for the information of the receiving application,
but is not necessary for this example's operation. Likewise, the extref
would only be necessary if the receiving application wanted to be
able to do validation.
A fragment conforms to this XML Fragment Interchange Recommendation if it adheres to all syntactic requirements defined in this Recommendation. A fragment is syntactically correct if all of the requirements specified in Section 5.2 are met.
Application software acting as recipient conforms to the XML Fragment Interchange Recommendation if it interprets all conforming XML fragments (as defined above) according to all required semantics prescribed by this Recommendation, and, for any optional semantics it chooses to support, supports them in the way prescribed. Specifically, conforming application software must be able to parse all conforming valid fragment context specification information whether it chooses to support its semantics or not. Application software acting as sender conforms to the XML Fragment Interchange Recommendation if it creates conforming XML fragments (as defined above) and, if including fragment context information, includes conforming fragment context information according to the requirements in section 4.
If fragment context information is included with a transmitted fragment, then it should conform according to the requirements in section 4.
IETF RFC 2396: Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax. See ftp://ftp.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
World Wide Web Consortium. Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0. W3C Recommendation. See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml
World Wide Web Consortium. Namespaces in XML W3C Proposed Recommendation. See http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-xml-names
World Wide Web Consortium. Associating stylesheets with XML documents W3C Working Draft. See http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xml-stylesheet
OASIS (formerly SGML Open) Fragment Interchange -- SGML Open Technical Resolution 9601:1996 . OASIS (SGML Open) Technical Resolution. See http://www.oasis-open.org/html/techpubs.htm#fragment for an online version
IETF RFC 2045: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies. See http://www.imc.org/rfc2045
IETF RFC 2387: The MIME Multipart/Related Content-type. See http://www.imc.org/rfc2387
IETF RFC 2392: Content-ID and Message-ID Uniform Resource Locators. See ftp://ftp.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2392.txt
World Wide Web Consortium. XML Fragment Interchange Requirements W3C Note. See http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-XML-FRAG-REQ
World Wide Web Consortium. XML Pointer Language (XPointer) W3C Working Draft. See http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xptr
It is a design goal of this Recommendation to define a fragment context specification to be a well-formed XML document. However, a fragment body itself need not be a well-formed document, but only well-balanced. While it is important to be able to package a fragment body with its fcs, it is expected that a general XML-friendly packaging mechanism--beyond the scope of this Recommendation--will be developed by the W3C that would satisfy this requirement. Meanwhile, applications and interchange partners may agree on any packaging mechanism to aid in fragment interchange. This appendix gives some non-normative examples of such possible packaging mechanisms.
WG Note: (1999/03/17): There needs to be a requirement on the eventual XML Packaging WG to be able to handle fragment interchange packaging needs. The XML Fragment chair will ensure any XML Package WG briefing package/charter includes the necessary dependency language.
The fcs
element could be packaged along with the fragment body
by combining them into a single well-formed XML document. For the purposes
of fragment interchange packaging, one could define a simple "document type"
consisting of a "head" part containing the fcs (and, potentially, other) metadata
followed by a "body" part containing the fragment body itself.
In the
following template, p
is defined as the local prefix referring
to the namespace defined for the packaging structure, and f
,
as in previous sections, is the local prefix referring to the namespace defined
by this Recommendation for fragment-interchange related components. (Note
that this template example assumes that no explicit namespace prefixes are
present in the fragment body. If the fragment body contains explicit namespace
prefixes whose declarations are not also included in the fragment body, then
additional namespace declarations would be necessary on the <p:package>
or <f:fcs>
element. If the parent document does not
use namespaces at all, then no default namespace declaration is needed for
the fcs or its package.)
The format of a complete fragment package might be outlined as follows:
<p:package xmlns:p="http://www.w3.org/XML/Package/1.0" xmlns:f="http://www.w3.org/XML/Fragment/1.0" xmlns="{the default namespace in effect at the start of the fragment body in the parent document}"> <f:fcs {the ref attributes on the fcs tag}> {the content of the fcs with no namespace prefixes necessary except that on the <f:fragbody/> element} </f:fcs> <p:body> {the fragment body with no namespace prefixes necessary} </p:body> </p:package>
Note
The above template includes indentation and blank lines to help display the overall structure of the package. However, all whitespace within the
p:body
element is significant and is therefore part of the fragment body. Therefore, the packaging process can introduce no whitespace (including record ends immediately following<p:body>
and immediately preceding</p:body>
) within thep:body
element.
The following examples are designed in general to address the potential reference scenarios described in XML Fragment Requirements Document.
The user has an XML document that represents a customer's set of purchases at a bookstore, and the part of that document that represents the purchase of a particular book needs to be represented as a fragment.
Here is the original XML document for the transaction:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <transaction TID="19990207-1234"> <purchase> <book> <Author>Frank Herbert</Author> <Title>Dune</Title> <Edition>Hardcover Reissue edition (April 1984)</Edition> <ISBN>0399128964</ISBN> <Price currency="USD">18.87</Price> <Quantity>1</Quantity> </book> <book> <Author>J. R. R. Tolkien</Author> <Title>The Book of Lost Tales (The History of Middle-Earth)</Title> <Edition>Mass Market Paperback Reprint edition (June 1992)</Edition> <ISBN>0345375211</ISBN> <Price currency="USD">4.79</Price> <Quantity>1</Quantity> </book> </purchase> <refund RID="19990115-2"> <reason TID="19981220-3214">Late delivery</reason> <value currency="USD">5.00</value> </refund> <payment> <client CID="123421"/> <value currency="USD">18.66</value> <creditcard type="MasterCard"> <bank>BankBoston</bank> <owner>Joe J. Bill</owner> <serial>1234567890</serial> <expires>5/99</expires> </creditcard> <status>Waiting for approval</status> </payment> </transaction>
Here is a fragment representing the second book
element from the above document (the sourcelocn
attribute on
the f:fcs
element is optional and is shown merely as an example):
<?xml version="1.0"?> <p:package xmlns:p="http://acme.com/Packaging/1.0"> <p:fcs xmlns:f="http://www.w3.org/XML/Fragment/1.0" sourcelocn="http://acme.com/trans1234#root().child(1,purchase).child(2,book)"> <transaction> <purchase> <book/> <p:fragbody/> </purchase> </transaction> </p:fcs> <p:body> <book> <Author>J. R. R. Tolkien</Author> <Title>The Book of Lost Tales (The History of Middle-Earth)</Title> <Edition>Mass Market Paperback Reprint edition (June 1992)</Edition> <ISBN>0345375211</ISBN> <Price currency="USD">4.79</Price> <Quantity>1</Quantity> </book> </p:body> </p:package>
A user has an XML document that includes several external entities, and she wants to be able to interchange a fragment that includes a reference to the entities using MIME [ MIME] packaging. (For references, see also RFC 2387 and RFC 2392.)
Here is the original document:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE book SYSTEM "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/3.0/docbook.dtd" [ <!ENTITY title "My Book"> <!ENTITY author "me"> <!ENTITY try SYSTEM "try.cgm" NDATA CGM-BINARY> ]> <book> <part> <title>&title;</title> <introduction>This is my book ...</introduction> <author>&author;</author> <chapter type="intro"> <sect1>The introduction ...</sect1> </chapter> <chapter>...</chapter> <chapter> <p>This is a paragraph within the third chapter within the first part of a Docbook <quote>book</quote> document.</p> <p>And this is a succeeding paragraph.</p> <p>And an internal text entity reference &author;.</p> <p>And a reference to an unparsed entity (a CGM graphic): <graphic entityref="try"></graphic></p> </chapter> <chapter>...</chapter> </part> </book>
Note that the DocBook DTD includes the following (which is therefore not included in the internal subset of this document):
<!NOTATION CGM-BINARY PUBLIC "ISO 8632/3//NOTATION Binary Encoding//EN">
Here is a fragment that represents the contents of the third chapter:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <f:fcs xmlns:f="http://www.w3.org/XML/Fragment/1.0" xmlns="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/3.0/docbook.dtd" extref="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/3.0/docbook.dtd" intref="mybook.decls"> <book> <part> <chapter type="intro"/> <chapter/> <chapter> <f:fragbody fragbodyref="chapter3.xml"/> </chapter> </part> </book> </f:fcs>
Here is the corresponding fragment body:
<p>This is a paragraph within the third chapter within the first part of a Docbook <quote>book</quote> document.</p> <p>And this is a succeeding paragraph.</p> <p>And an internal text entity reference &author;.</p> <p>And a reference to an unparsed entity (a CGM graphic): <graphic entityref="try"></graphic></p>
Here is the associated internal subset:
<!ENTITY title "My Book"> <!ENTITY author "me"> <!ENTITY try SYSTEM "try.cgm" NDATA CGM-BINARY>
Here is the external entity (represented in Base 64 encoding, since this is really a binary entity):
ACEAABAiAAEQXwBEQyJTb3VyY2U6IEhTSSAvV01GLXRvLUNHTSBmaWx0ZXIg LyBWZXJzaW9uIDEuMzUgIiAiRGF0ZTogMTk5OS0wMS0xNyIRZgAB//8AARBi AAAQpgAAAAkAFxFGAAAA////EYQwIgAQEYogyAAAAAB//3//AAARvwC3C1RJ TUVTX1JPTUFODFRJTUVTX0lUQUxJQwpUSU1FU19CT0xEEVRJTUVTX0JPTERf SVRBTElDCUhFTFZFVElDQRFIRUxWRVRJQ0FfT0JMSVFVRQ5IRUxWRVRJQ0Ff Qk9MRBZIRUxWRVRJQ0FfQk9MRF9PQkxJUVVFB0NPVVJJRVIOQ09VUklFUl9J VEFMSUMMQ09VUklFUl9CT0xEE0NPVVJJRVJfQk9MRF9JVEFMSUMGU1lNQk9M ABHOAAABQgABAUEABAMqLToR4gABAGEAACAmAAE9NJ9IIEIAASBiAAAgggAA IKIAACDI95D0wAhqCzoAAACAQWj5cAa5/TEJikGGAogCUQGQUGIACEAo+dD/ +v7g+TpRYgACUkwAAQAEAAAAAAAAAABRgBxUggAAABkAGQAAFKCAAJAkAEg/ MoAAQlTb21lIFRleHQAoABA
And here is an example of MIME packaging used to transmit the fragment context specification, the fragment body, the internal subset, and the external entity within a single stream such as a mail message:
Content-Type: multipart/related; boundary="/04w6evG8XlLl3ft";type="text/xml" --/04w6evG8XlLl3ft Content-Type: text/xml; charset=us-ascii Content-ID: <part1> Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="mybook.decls" <!ENTITY title "My Book"> <!ENTITY author "me"> <!ENTITY try SYSTEM "cid:part2" NDATA CGM-BINARY> --/04w6evG8XlLl3ft Content-Type: image/cgm Content-ID: <part2> Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="try.cgm" ACEAABAiAAEQXwBEQyJTb3VyY2U6IEhTSSAvV01GLXRvLUNHTSBmaWx0ZXIg LyBWZXJzaW9uIDEuMzUgIiAiRGF0ZTogMTk5OS0wMS0xNyIRZgAB//8AARBi AAAQpgAAAAkAFxFGAAAA////EYQwIgAQEYogyAAAAAB//3//AAARvwC3C1RJ TUVTX1JPTUFODFRJTUVTX0lUQUxJQwpUSU1FU19CT0xEEVRJTUVTX0JPTERf SVRBTElDCUhFTFZFVElDQRFIRUxWRVRJQ0FfT0JMSVFVRQ5IRUxWRVRJQ0Ff Qk9MRBZIRUxWRVRJQ0FfQk9MRF9PQkxJUVVFB0NPVVJJRVIOQ09VUklFUl9J VEFMSUMMQ09VUklFUl9CT0xEE0NPVVJJRVJfQk9MRF9JVEFMSUMGU1lNQk9M ABHOAAABQgABAUEABAMqLToR4gABAGEAACAmAAE9NJ9IIEIAASBiAAAgggAA IKIAACDI95D0wAhqCzoAAACAQWj5cAa5/TEJikGGAogCUQGQUGIACEAo+dD/ +v7g+TpRYgACUkwAAQAEAAAAAAAAAABRgBxUggAAABkAGQAAFKCAAJAkAEg/ MoAAQlTb21lIFRleHQAoABA --/04w6evG8XlLl3ft Content-Type: text/xml; charset=us-ascii Content-ID: <part3> Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="chapter3.xml" <p>This is a paragraph within the third chapter within the first part of a Docbook <quote>book</quote> document.</p> <p>And this is a succeeding paragraph.</p> <p>And an internal text entity reference &author;.</p> <p>And a reference to an unparsed entity (a CGM graphic): <graphic entityref="try"></graphic></p> --/04w6evG8XlLl3ft Content-Type: text/xml; charset=us-ascii <?xml version="1.0"?> <f:fcs xmlns:f="http://www.w3.org/XML/Fragment/1.0" xmlns="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/3.0/docbook.dtd" extref="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/3.0/docbook.dtd" intref="cid:part1"> <book> <part> <chapter type="intro"/> <chapter/> <chapter> <f:fragbody fragbodyref="cid:part3"/> </chapter> </part> </book> </f:fcs> --/04w6evG8XlLl3ft--
The user has very large XML documents, possibly a gigabyte or more in size, and wishes to be able to view portions of the document without parsing the whole document. In order to do this the user creates an "index" for each document portion (fragment) that they wish to so address. The "index" consists of a fragment context specification in combination with a packaging mechanism designed for quick access to the fragment body. This should be used to view and browse documents with a flat structure, like HTML, on devices where only a part of the document can be parsed or rendered.
<?xml version="1.0"?> <f:fcs xmlns:f="http://www.w3.org/XML/Fragment/1.0" xmlns="" fragbodyref="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml.html#sec-xml-and-sgml" extref="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40-971218/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <link rel='STYLESHEET' type='text/css' href='/StyleSheets/TR/rec.css'/> </head> <body> <h1>Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0</h1> <h2 ID='sec-intro'>1. Introduction</h2> <h3 ID='sec-origin-goals'>1.1 Origin and Goals</h3> <h3 ID='sec-terminology'>1.2 Terminology</h3> <h2 ID='sec-documents'>2. Documents</h2> <h3 ID='sec-well-formed'>2.1 Well-Formed XML Documents</h3> <h3 ID='charsets'>2.2 Characters</h3> <h3 ID='sec-common-syn'>2.3 Common Syntactic Constructs</h3> <h3 ID='syntax'>2.4 Character Data and Markup</h3> <h3 ID='sec-comments'>2.5 Comments</h3> <h3 ID='sec-pi'>2.6 Processing Instructions</h3> <h3 ID='sec-cdata-sect'>2.7 CDATA Sections</h3> <h3 ID='sec-prolog-dtd'>2.8 Prolog and Document Type Declaration</h3> <h3 ID='sec-rmd'>2.9 Standalone Document Declaration</h3> <h3 ID='sec-white-space'>2.10 White Space Handling</h3> <h3 ID='sec-line-ends'>2.11 End-of-Line Handling</h3> <h3 ID='sec-lang-tag'>2.12 Language Identification</h3> <h2 ID='sec-logical-struct'>3. Logical Structures</h2> <h3 ID='sec-starttags'>3.1 Start-Tags, End-Tags, and Empty-Element Tags</h3> <h3 ID='elemdecls'>3.2 Element Type Declarations</h3> <h4 ID='sec-element-content'>3.2.1 Element Content</h4> <h4 ID='sec-mixed-content'>3.2.2 Mixed Content</h4> <h3 ID='attdecls'>3.3 Attribute-List Declarations</h3> <h4 ID='sec-attribute-types'>3.3.1 Attribute Types</h4> <h4 ID='sec-attr-defaults'>3.3.2 Attribute Defaults</h4> <h4 ID='AVNormalize'>3.3.3 Attribute-Value Normalization</h4> <h3 ID='sec-condition-sect'>3.4 Conditional Sections</h3> <h2 ID='sec-physical-struct'>4. Physical Structures</h2> <h3 ID='sec-references'>4.1 Character and Entity References</h3> <h3 ID='sec-entity-decl'>4.2 Entity Declarations</h3> <h4 ID='sec-internal-ent'>4.2.1 Internal Entities</h4> <h4 ID='sec-external-ent'>4.2.2 External Entities</h4> <h3 ID='TextEntities'>4.3 Parsed Entities</h3> <h4 ID='sec-TextDecl'>4.3.1 The Text Declaration</h4> <h4 ID='wf-entities'>4.3.2 Well-Formed Parsed Entities</h4> <h4 ID='charencoding'>4.3.3 Character Encoding in Entities</h4> <h3 ID='entproc'>4.4 XML Processor Treatment of Entities and References</h3> <h4 ID='not-recognized'>4.4.1 Not Recognized</h4> <h4 ID='included'>4.4.2 Included</h4> <h4 ID='include-if-valid'>4.4.3 Included If Validating</h4> <h4 ID='forbidden'>4.4.4 Forbidden</h4> <h4 ID='inliteral'>4.4.5 Included in Literal</h4> <h4 ID='notify'>4.4.6 Notify</h4> <h4 ID='bypass'>4.4.7 Bypassed</h4> <h4 ID='as-PE'>4.4.8 Included as PE</h4> <h3 ID='intern-replacement'>4.5 Construction of Internal Entity Replacement Text</h3> <h3 ID='sec-predefined-ent'>4.6 Predefined Entities</h3> <h3 ID='Notations'>4.7 Notation Declarations</h3> <h3 ID='sec-doc-entity'>4.8 Document Entity</h3> <h2 ID='sec-conformance'>5. Conformance</h2> <h3 ID='proc-types'>5.1 Validating and Non-Validating Processors</h3> <h3 ID='safe-behavior'>5.2 Using XML Processors</h3> <h2 ID='sec-notation'>6. Notation</h2> <h3>Appendices</h3>A. <A ID='sec-bibliography'>References</A> <h3 ID='sec-existing-stds'>A.1 Normative References</h3> <h3 ID='null'>A.2 Other References</h3> <h2 ID='CharClasses'>B. Character Classes</h2> <f:fragbody/> <h2 ID='sec-entexpand'>D. Expansion of Entity and Character References (Non-Normative)</h2> <h2 ID='determinism'>E. Deterministic Content Models (Non-Normative)</h2> <h2 ID='sec-guessing'>F. Autodetection of Character Encodings (Non-Normative)</h2> <h2 ID='sec-xml-wg'>G. W3C XML Working Group (Non-Normative)</h2> </body> </html> </f:fcs>
In the design of any language, trade-offs in the solution space are necessary. To aid in making these trade-offs the follow design principles were used (the order of these principles is not necessarily significant):
The following participated in the XML Fragment WG during the authoring of this Recommendation:
Major changes to the previous public working draft are outlined below. Various other changes have also been made throughout the document.
fragbodyref
attribute to the fragbody
element (Production [NT-FCSfragbody]) and renamed
the fragbodyref
attribute of the fcs element to sourcelocn
.Major changes to the previous public working draft are outlined below. Various other minor changes have also been made to the document.