Metafile for Interactive Documents. Version 2.0. Application Guide and DraftPerformance Specification for the Encoding of Interactive Documents

摘要

The primary purpose of this document is to communicate, to authors and developersof MID documents and applications, the intentions of the design team with respect to implementation of the MID DTD. Section 6 contains the DTD, with annotations, arranged by functional groupings of elements as described in Section 5. The MID design team has debated many issues in creating this DTD, and the annotations are presented to pass along as much of that consideration as possible. There are some issues remaining, and the MID project staff solicits your input to making the design more useful and complete. Note that the use of terms such as 'specification' or 'standard' are not intended to claim the sanctioning of MID in an official sense. The terminology for describing MID is intended to convey its purpose, namely as a common structure into which technical information can be translated. For the record, the MID is the result of a research effort, not the work of a standards body. It is our hope that the technology and techniques employed by MID will prove the concepts to be valid, and provide guidance to those who would solve the problem of transporting information and logic between source providers and presentation software. Adoption of MID as an official specification or standard is a consideration for the future. This document also contains a general introduction to the MID (Sections 3 4), and references for more information and background (Section 2). For the seasoned MID user, Section 7 provides an alphabetical reference to the elements, and Section 8 chronicles the changes from the original MID definition (1994) to the current, evolutionary version (1995). Appendix A contains a processable MID DTD. Appendix B contains an example using elements derived from the relationship architectural form defined by the MID.