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Re: Goodbye to textual applications?

• To: akuchlin@m...
• Subject: Re: Goodbye to textual applications?
• From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
• Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 13:01:30 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <9A4FC925410C024792B85198DF1E97E4021BD057@u...> <200112201636.IAA25760@d...> <20011220165332.GA21240@u...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120

Andrew Kuchling wrote:


> But is a DTD-less XML still good for writing up novels and recipes?
> DTDs provide just about the right level of strictness for textual
> data, where ordering of elements is often all that you need and the
> readability of the schema matters.  I'm a bit concerned that dropping
> DTDs will mean the end of such applications.  If you take away DTDs,
> what is there to replace them? 


<rave>
The RELAX NG schema language is a very suitable substitute for
DTDs in such applications.

RNG provides a much richer degree of structural validation:
it can easily handle things like "either an attribute or a child
element, but not both", or multiple content models for elements
depending on their context of occurrence, and it resuscitates the SGML
"&" connector in a new and greatly improved flavor.  RNG uses a "plug-in
datatypes" metamodel for applications that care about datatypes.

There are in practice three surface syntaxes for RNG: the official one,
which is a quite readable XML instance; an informal BNF-like one, which
is even easier for humans to read and write; and XML DTD syntax :-).
The last two syntaxes are supported by open-source converters to
the official syntax.

More at http://www.relaxng.org .  Read the tutorial, not the
specification, unless you enjoy formalisms.
</rave>

-- 
Not to perambulate             || John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
    the corridors               || http://www.reutershealth.com
during the hours of repose     || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    in the boots of ascension.  \\ Sign in Austrian ski-resort hotel

• References:
  • Time to put SGML out to pasture? (was RE: Why would MS want to make XML break on UNIX, Perl, Python, etc ?)
    • From: "Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@S...>
  • Re: Time to put SGML out to pasture?
    • From: Joe English <jenglish@f...>
  • Re: Goodbye to textual applications?
    • From: Andrew Kuchling <akuchlin@m...>

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