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Ronald Bourret wrote: > > I have several DTDs with conflicting definitions of certain elements. > > ...Am I going to have to break down and just rewrite the DTDs to use > > the qualified names? > > If you want to use a namespace-unaware parser, I don't see how you can > avoid rewriting the DTDs. Maybe I misunderstand, but as far as I can see, namespaces won't help you, either. Why? Because even if you can refer to, say, your two TITLE elements by different prefixes, you'll still have to declare the prefixed elements in the DTD as if they were atomic element names. Namespaces, in other words, don't solve your problem. They may make it worse, in fact, because you have to know what prefixes you are going to declare in a given document to be able to rewrite your DTD to work with that document. There was a furor two or three months ago on this list about namespaces breaking validation. That furor died down when the namespace spec became an official recommendation (a done deal, in other words). Just so you know, though: The issue you raise is just the sort of thing that caused the furor. People were expecting namespaces to help in just your situation. When they found out that namespaces didn't help, many were disappointed, and said so. The most effective responses I saw were from people who said, in effect, "Namespaces do far less than you want or expect them to." The question is my mind is whether they actually get in the way. (You won't hear any gripes from me if my take on namespaces turns out to be dead wrong.) -- Richard Goerwitz PGP key fingerprint: C1 3E F4 23 7C 33 51 8D 3B 88 53 57 56 0D 38 A0 For more info (mail, phone, fax no.): finger richard@g... 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 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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