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

• To: "The Deviants" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: life support for DTDs? was RE: misprocessing namespaces)
• From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>
• Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2002 21:52:14 +1100
• References: <6D54B6A5DCF9D311971600D0B74758C101441B66@a...> <098701c1aa69$4d4d3cc0$0a2e249b@n...> <010801c1aa7d$f828ec70$4bc8a8c0@A...> <20020201103159.C1428@i...>

 From: "Alan Kent" <ajk@m...>
 
> At the risk of looking like a fool (having started reading the thread
> half way through), I don't quite understand the above. I would have
> thought you would have done something like (syntax is indicative only)
> 
> <!XMLNS y "http://foo.bar/baz/">
> <!XMLNS q "http://rumplestiltskin.com/">
> <!ELEMENT y:x (y:a, q:a)>
> <!ELEMENT y:a (#PCDATA)>
> <!ELEMENT q:a (#PCDATA)>
> <!ATTLIST q:a age CDATA #IMPLIED
>               q:type CDATA #FIXED "123">
> 
> The name spaces would be in scope for the DTD only (not instances).
> It would allow you to mix different namespaces in one DTD. There would
> be some scoping ssues to be resolved because you would want to import
> other DTDs and not accidentally collide on namespace prefixes
> (eg: DTD namespace declarations are local to the current external entity
> or something like that).

Oh, the thread was asking "could we extend DTDs to include namespaces?"
and I was pointing out that we didn't need to change DTDs, just to
widen their interpretation.  That way we don't have to change any parsers
or existing DTDs (except to add xmlns declarations for all elements)
or existing documents, just the validators used. Of course,
if you write a document that didn't use the literal names given in the DTD,
that document would not validate if the DTD was used with XML 1.0, but
that is no different from now.  

The approach of revising the DTD syntax for a special kind of schema
has been tried before, but failed to thrive.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

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