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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Namespaces: silly question
 Posted for Murray Altheim, who is having trouble posting to XML-Dev. My comments appear in double square brackets. John Cowan <cowan@l...> writes: [...] > The problem is all the worse in that IBTWSH doesn't have a root > element, being meant solely for embedding (there are no IBTWSH > *documents* as such; HTML serves that function). I know you just > chose IBTWSH as a well-known example, but the problem's bigger > than you thought. I'm not sure what you mean. There is no way to declare a root element in a DTD. Paraphrasing Eliot Kimber, a DTD is nothing more than a collection of markup declarations. Nothing in a DTD actually describes a document, merely structures that might make up a document. The root element can be almost any element (RefEntry rather than Book in DocBook, forinstance). [[My reply: Right. However, IBTWSH is *designed* to be used in this way, embedded in other documents with larger DTDs.]] [...] > Seems to me that it *must* do this in the name of SGML backward > compatibility. The developers of namespaces don't seem to give > a red rubber rat's **** about DTD-based validation. I don't think that's entirely true, given the long, heated arguments over the issue. It seems merely that those that wanted namespaces regardless of DTDs won out over those that thought full compatibility with XML 1.0 (including PIs and DTDs) was more important. I find that unfortunate, but I guess we'll all have to live with it now or find somewhere else to look for standardization. In all of my testing, I have found namespaces and DTDs to be inherently incompatible in all but the most constrained (and manually modified) instances. The whole point of namespaces was to allow combination of existing namespaces. If one has to modify all the element and attribute names in a DTD, the justification for namespaces evaporates: one might as well change HTML's 'pre' to 'HTML_pre' than bother to use 'HTML:pre'. [[My reply: Still worse if one must modify the instance itself, removing all non-unique prefixes, in order to achieve validation at all!]] And the idea of manually modifying the 7,623 lines of DocBook (much less TEI) is perfectly ludicrous. In all but trivial cases this must be a machine process, but given that element type names and attribute names show up undifferentiated in PEs, I don't know that this is possible. [[My reply: Remove PEs first by a preprocessor, I guess.]] Also, the namespace declaration must occur before the markup declaration it is to be applied to is parsed, but unfortunately the current draft's namespace 'declaration' doesn't occur until after the prolog, when the namespace boundaries of the various markup declarations have already been lost. IOW, if we assume a mix of several unqualified DTDs as separate entities, we must declare the prefix to be applied to each entity before they are mixed together. Murray ........................................................................... Murray Altheim, SGML Grease Monkey <mailto:altheim@eng.sun.com> Member of Technical Staff, Tools Development & Support Sun Microsystems, 901 San Antonio Rd., UMPK17-102, Palo Alto, CA 94303-4900 "Give a monkey the tools and he'll build a typewriter." xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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