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Re: Come On, DTD, Come On! Thoughts on DSDL Part 9

• To: ari@c... (K. Ari Krupnikov)
• Subject: Re: Come On, DTD, Come On! Thoughts on DSDL Part 9
• From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
• Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 21:18:21 -0400 (EDT)
• Cc: jcowan@r... (John Cowan), dsdl-comment@d..., xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <86ptyxb9kz.fsf@p...> from "K. Ari Krupnikov" at Jun 11, 2002 08:54:20 PM

K. Ari Krupnikov scripsit:

> Must be my lack of SGML experience. Can you elaborate on this one?

It's just nice to be able to write:

<!ELEMENT h1|h2|h3|h4|h5|h6 (%flow.model;)>

instead of six different element declarations.

> > General issue:	Should there be some way to indicate candidate roots?
> > In existing DTDs, any element can be a root.
> 
> On a tangent, I'd like to point out that the name of the root element
> in the doctypedecl (production 28 in XML, "<!DOCTYPE foo...") is only
> required for SGML compatibility and is superfluous in XML where tags
> may not be omitted and the first encountered element is unambiguously
> the root. If the proposal will break SGML compatibility anyway (the
> snipped text suggests it will), it might as well drop this unnecessary
> requirement and its associated validity constraint.

Indeed.  But note that I am *not* proposing a revision of XML DTDs,
but rather the creation of a new schema language to be a superset of
XML DTDs.  Schemas of this kind cannot be referenced by DOCTYPE
declarations, because the result would be not well-formed.  Instead,
they must be specified to the external validation program.

This is purely my own idea and may not be the way that the committee
is going.  Indeed, they are in a use-case/requirement collecting phase
and not yet doing syntax.

-- 
John Cowan <jcowan@r...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

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