[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Compound Documents - necessary for success?
Chris von See writes: > Without a DTD or schema on which to "hang your hat", so to speak, > you're vesting the application with the knowledge of what the > various namespace-qualified constructs mean. This strikes me as a > Very Bad Thing, because it leaves individual applications to > interpret (potentially, interpret very differently) what a > particular attribute or element means. The situation that Chris describes exists with or without a DTD. Imagine that I have a DTD containing the following: <!ELEMENT body (title, p+)> <!ELEMENT p (#PCDATA|emphasis)*> I know where <p> is allowed to appear, and I know what it is allowed to contain, but I know *nothing* more about what it means -- that information is still hard-coded in an application somewhere. I am a big fan of DTDs and have even written a book on them, but I don't buy the 'discipline-of-writing-a-DTD-makes-you-think' model any more than I buy the 'discipline-of-learning-Latin-makes-you-think' model (and I enjoy reading Latin). Namespaces actually help the problem a bit: they still do not tell me what an element means (and I will be stunned if the result of the XML Schema WG's work does that either), but at least they provide a global point of reference. I do not know if <p> in document A and <p> in document B are meant to have anything in common, but I do know that (using James Clark's notation) <{http://www.megginson.com/ns/doc/}p> in document A and <{http://www.megginson.com/ns/doc/}p> in document B are meant to have something in common. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ 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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