[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: DOCTYPE misunderstood
In message <dc9jLEA+jsczEw38@l...> Richard Light writes: [...] > > I've been thinking about the issue of what comes at the head of an XML > document. This may be stating the obvious, but ... > > While it would be generally agreed that you can't gratuitously stick any > old <!DOCTYPE header onto a piece of well-formed XML, I think there is a > case for architecting XML so that you _can_ hold the naked XML without > _any_ header information, and prepend both DOCTYPE and style processing > instructions at delivery time. > > One reason is that you might want to author a document in chunks, and > either publish/work with the chunks in their own right, or put those > chunks together via a 'master document' containing lots of entity > references to pull the chunks in. For the first purpose, the free- > standing chunks will require a DOCTYPE header, not least so you can > create them in a structured XML-aware editor. For the second purpose, > they need to be 'naked', since you can't pull in an entity with a > DOCTYPE at the beginning, and we don't have the SMGL SUBDOC facility in > XML. This is a problem I have come up against, and still concerns me. I would like to encourage authors to create documents in small reusable chunks, the question being whether we use a construction like: <!DOCTYPE CML [ <!ENTITY chunk1 SYSTEM "chunk1.cml"> ... etc... ]> <CML> ... &chunk1; </CML> with the chunks (say) being: <MOL> ... </MOL> or whether we use something like <!DOCTYPE CML [ <!ENTITY mini1 SYSTEM "mini1.cml"> ]> <CML> <XLIST XML-LINK="EXTENDED"> <XVAR XML-LINK="LOCATOR" ACTUATE="AUTO" SHOW="EMBED" HREF="&mini1;"></XVAR> </XLIST> </CML> with mini1.cml being: <!DOCTYPE CML> <MOL> ... </MOL> Now, I wrote this latter on the fly, and it looks horribly clunky and it's much more difficult to implement. And is it *legal*? and will it do what I want? The advantage is that the mini version can be used in its own right and we know what language it's in. Chunks like: <A>Foo <B>Bar</B> </A> do not carry their DTD and also unwanted whitespace could easily creep in. Constructions like: <A >Foo<B >Bar</B ></A > might solve some, but not all of the whitespace problem. Since this must be a Well Investigated Problem, insight would be useful. P. -- Peter Murray-Rust, domestic net connection Virtual School of Molecular Sciences http://www.vsms.nottingham.ac.uk/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@i...)
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