[DAS2] properties

[Thomas Down]

On 15 Jan 2006, at 23:31, Andrew Dalke wrote:
>
> Types have <PROP> elements like
>
>     <PROP key="bg:glyph"     value="box" />
>     <PROP key="bg:bgcolor"   value="white" />
>     <PROP key="bg:fgcolor"   value="black" />
>
> These will be merged into a single common pattern, which
> looks like
>
>   <PROP key="some_name" value="blah" />
>
> (See [1] below)
>
> The key names are string of the form [a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*
>
> (See [2] below)

This seems to be inventing a new namespace-management mechanism.  I'm  
always a bit nervous about schemes which require someone to maintain  
a registry of namespaces.  Was there really a problem with the old  
system of using the XML document's namespace map to scope property  
names?

The one thing I saw missing from the old spec was a mechanism for  
doing namespace-scoped property queries.  I guess shoehorning this  
into an application/x-www-form-urlencoded query isn't ideal, but it  
could be done.  How about

                 feature?xmlns:bg=http:%2f%2fwww.bioperl.org% 
2fbiographics%2fproperties;att=bg:fgcolor:red


Thomas.