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RE: life support for DTDs? was RE: misprocessing nam

• To: 'Jonathan Borden' <jborden@m...>, Mike Champion <mc@x...>, The Deviants <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: life support for DTDs? was RE: misprocessing namespaces)
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 09:31:32 -0600

So you have two points:

1.  Either MSXML is a non-conforming processor or XHTMLnoveau is not a 
conforming DTD.  

That's a heckuva a lack of commitment on someone's part.

2.  James needs something new to implement.  

A bored mind is a terrible thing to waste.  Otherwise, "we" eagerly 
await what his new ISO group produces.  He always produces something 
useful.  Should "we" be more influenced by him than that?  Ok.  
As Steve said, he wrote the book on arch forms so if he wants to 
deprecate them now, let him make his case here. Otherwise, 
we are exploring alternatives proposed by other members of 
the community, and Jonathan, worship as you like, James is 
just one more voice.

The plain fact is that developers here are still using DTDs.  I'm 
not saying they have to do that, just that they are and because 
of the namespace design, we have a more or less permanent 
incompatibility.  If we force feed that by making namespaces 
core, we have broken XML 1.0.  It's that simple.

I don't think DTDs are the issue here.  You tossed that in 
to start an exhaustion thread.   The issue is namespaces, 
alternatives to them, and whether or not it is practical 
or desirable to have means to associate behaviors or semantic 
descriptions of behaviors to XML instances.  What is it that 
a broader XML 2.0 should have in terms of a framework and 
what options are eliminated or preserved in that design?

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Borden [mailto:jborden@m...]

"Problem is, DTDs don't seem to be dieing as ordained.  Now
we have a moreorless permanent incompatibility by design.
Brilliant. "

One might have made the argument that DTDs are dying as ordained by the W3C,
but this is only part of the story.

1) MSXML can't properly validate the latest XHTML DTD, so it appears that
Microsoft is not seriously supporting DTDs
2) James Clark tells the XML community to move on, at this point he is
certainly not the voice of the W3C

The plain fact is that the major commercial entities have already moved on
and the new work in XML is focussed directly at the various schema
languages. If namespaces could be made to work _properly_ with DTDs, and I
am sure this is possible with a few clever hacks, then I think DTDs are
actually quite easy to work with. But as I've said, this seems to be a done
deal, and at present I would rather focus on making XML better for the
future rathering than arguing old battles long gone.

This applies to both namespace and DTDs. Perhaps if anyone is really
interested in keeping DTDs alive, they might publish such a proposal to fix
the problem, accompanied by some software that implements the proposal. Then
we would be able to see if it flies.

Otherwise, as we say: "Call the code."

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