[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Why validate? (was Re: Parser compliance)
ht@c... (Henry S. Thompson) writes: > Maybe I was overly influenced by the fact that my first exposure to > pointy brackets was in the context of SGML, but I think validation is > pretty fundamental. I don't think that anyone is arguing against the usefulness of validation -- Tim's point is DTDs and other formal schemas alone supply only a small subset the validation necessary for any real-world information exchange. > A DTD is like a contract, it helps both clients and service > providers to maintain a satisfactory working relationship. It's a very simply contract, though; consider the following DTD: <!ELEMENT song (title, composer)> <!ELEMENT title (#PCDATA)> <!ELEMENT composer (#PCDATA)> Here's a document that's valid according to that DTD, and that doesn't fiddle with the DTD in its internal subset: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE song SYSTEM "song.dtd"> <song> <title>David Bowie</title> <composer>Let's Dance</composer> </song> As Eliot, Tim, and I have all mentioned (in different contexts), the primary contract *has* to be the human readable documentation, even though the DTD is useful for detecting a certain subset of problems. 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe 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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