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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Does DTD validation work with namespaces?
 Norman Walsh commented on my previous post (qutoed by Winchel 'Todd' Vincent, III) - > | Presumably, it would mean "If this fragment had been embedded in a valid > | structure according to its own DTD, this fragment would not cause the whole > | structure to be invalid." > | > | This sounds like a tall order for a processor to understand, and also a tall > | order to describe in a DTD. It's funny, though, isn't it? All us humans > | know pretty well what it would mean: e.g., if we put in an <html:h2> > | element, we want a processor to display an h2 heading at that point **as > | if** it were an html document. It's the formal aspect that's tough. > > I don't, in fact, agree that it's easy for humans to understand. Given: > > <bookinfo> > <author><firstname>Norman</firstname> > <html:h2>Is a Big Fat Idiot</html:h2> > <surname>Walsh</surname> > </author> > </bookinfo> > > I have no idea what that H2 means. It doesn't mean display an H2 heading, > it *can't* mean that because the author isn't displayed at all, it's > just metadata that's associated with the document. Now I have a document > with unintelligable metadata. I'm totally confused. > I see I simplified too much to try to make a point. Let me try again. Seems to me that the only reasons to include elements from other namespaces in a document are 1) to reuse the same element names, like <h2>, but flag them as having some different meaning - which is a matter for the processor to handle -, or 2) to use some properties that usually belong to that other namespace. Ideally, perhaps, those properties would be semantics, but in a real XML document, all we can really get is the syntax. If I insert an h2 element from the html namespace, presumably I want some html property - probably processor behavior - to accompany it. Otherwise I wouldn't bother. For the example of including, say, contract elements within a civil pleading (as some people have been talking about), I presumably want to bring in the exact agreed-on semantics that go along with the "contracts" vocabulary. This is really a matter of semantics (or ontology, if you like to look at it that way), but in xml, semantics is a matter for the processor, not the parser. If we get the syntax right, perhaps there is some hope that the semantics are appropriate as well. So is a namespace really a glorified processing instruction that has a scope? Anyone care to tackle that one? Cheers, Tom Passin 
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