[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Weak DTDs
At 17:05 17/10/97 -0400, Paul Prescod wrote: > ><!ENTITY TEI SYSTEM "http://...."> >%TEI; ><!ELEMENT CAUTION TYEPOF P> > This is the sort of construct that I started with (but using HTML2.0). CML was designed to allow other frequently-used DTDs to be incorporated into a single conventional DTD that would validate any 'CML' document. The namespace syntax had not been addressed then, and gave me some headaches, but even when that is neglected I found difficulties. In essence they could be summarised by: - wishing to insert CML elements within HTML sections (since HTML has very weak support for typed data). - wishing to insert HTML sections within CML elements (e.g the descriptive hypertext for, say, a molecule. In the end the complex rules I devised became unworkable even for me (the author) that I abandoned them. I therefore gave up formal DTD validation. Yesterday evening I converted a typical chemical manuscript into CML including RDF and DC metadata, images, spectra, molecules, bibliography, XML-LINKs to several related XML and non-XML documents, and so on. I found the freedom of NOT having a 'conventional' DTD was very liberating. I believe that (with the latest JUMBO) it displays quite attractively and meaningfully to human readers. So what is the formal value of the document to *non-human* readers? I can see at least the following: - TEI 'searches' of the document (especially with STRING) are very powerful. [BTW, the fact that TEI defines substrings in PCDATA but not in attribute values means that I now favour using subelements rather than attributes. To that extent I think the XML-specs tilt the balance.] I should like to 'extend' the TEI approach to search for more complex fragments (early drafts suggested a FOREIGN keyword, which means that any algorithm can be tacked on). I'd like to keep in step with others here - is there any consensus on a formalised search language for XML documents? - many 'readers' will not need to access all the data in the document, and can reasonably extract small fragments, e.g. DESCENDANT(ALL,PERSON)CHILD(1,VAR,BUILTIN,EMAIL) will locate all the people who have e-mail addresses. - XML-STYLE looks likes being extremely valuable for many document transformations. [In the early days of JUMBO I wrote a lot of horrible code to process and display specific elements, and I now realise this should be done in XML-STYLE. Is anyone else hacking a Java version of XML-STYLE or do I have to do it myself?]. The most common operations on a generic CML document look like being: - display this attractively to a human - search document(s) for particular chunks of information and <do something useful with them> I then see a role for more specific DTDs for those people who need their documents to conform to specific formats (e.g. regulatory submissions, safety sheets, pharmacopeias, etc.) Hopefully they will pick features out of CML so that the semantics of elements is consistent throughout the community. I am an idealist :-) BTW I am particularly interested in actual implementations of things discussed on this list, or people who are interested in developing them collaboratively. Although XML has come a long way, we are nowhere near having enough examples of tools to convince the rest of the world :-) P. Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic net connection VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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