But I'm proposing a content-model() function whose only reason for
existence is simplification and terseness.
Tobi
At one stage XQuery did this. It had its own grammar for describing content
models, with all the paraphernalia of lists and unions and sequences, and it
allowed you to test whether a particular element conformed to a particular
content model (so-called "structural typing"). Everyone came down on them like
a ton of bricks, saying W3C already had a language for doing that and it was
called XML Schema. So they took it all out, leaving just the ability to test
whether a particular element is a valid instance of a particular schema-defined
type: "named typing". The result is vastly simpler, but it does assume that you
want to define your content models in a schema and not in a stylesheet - a
reasonable assumption, in my view.
Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael(_dot_)H(_dot_)Kay(_at_)ntlworld(_dot_)com
work: Michael(_dot_)Kay(_at_)softwareag(_dot_)com
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