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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Documents within documents
 > From: Marcus Carr [mailto:mrc@a...] <snip/> > Wayne Steele wrote: > > > I think this one important reason that many people can't > wait until DTDs are > > dead. They really make it hard to embed one XML document > into another. If > > DTDs are dead, it's trivial to embed one document into another. > > Wow, this is a side to DTDs that I'm unfamiliar with. Now, > merely by virtue of > the fact that they are still able to draw breath, DTDs > prevent one document from > being embedded in another by any means. Perhaps we should > reconsider them - they > appear to be powerful in ways not previously explained to me...;-) > > Horses for courses. When that whole recent RDDL debate raged, and turned into a debate about what is a document's type, I was firmly of the mind that DOCTYPEs no longer offered any value. Namespaces tell you all you need to know. But after hearing some of the comments from folks, I started to change my mind. I started thinking that DOCTYPEs could still have value as a sort of assembly mechanism. Using schemas, you can define modular vocabularies like reusable components. But there are use cases for being able to specify a grammar or system of constraints for a document as a whole, and specifying which of these modular vocabularies may be employed in them. It seems like there is utility in specifying such an assembly and attaching a name to it. I also started thinking that it might be an interesting excercise to see if RELAX NG could not fulfill all of the use cases that a DOCTYPE can fulfill, and which a schema anchored firmly to a namespace on an element cannot fulfill. Maybe we could even have a PI that serves the same purpose as an internal DTD subset using RELAX NG short syntax. I haven't delved very deeply into RELAX NG, yet, but to the extent that I have, I keep getting the feeling that RELAX NG offers some nice solutions to some festering problems in the existing suite of XML specs that the W3C is continuing to build upon. And I still want to kill off DTDs. I've just come around to the understanding that we have to be sure we are adequately addressing all of the use cases they serve before we do so -- and XML Schema is clearly not a DTD killer, but perhaps RELAX NG is. 
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