[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Namespaces and the Valid Document
[From: "Stallion, Jason (Cahners)" <JStallion@c...>] > I foresee a time when my company will want to construct XML documents > according to rules defined in distinct DTDs. Namespaces will play a part in > this. > > But those documents will still need to be validated. > > The URI associated with a namespace prefix does not need to point to a DTD. > Even if it does, there is no requirement in the recommendation that the DTD > play any part in validation. > > So how do I validate my document? Do I need to create a new DTD that > encompasses all of the newly-prefixed elements and attributes? This could > result in a need for dozens of DTDs: a new DTD every time I aggregate > someone else's XML document. Or, at the very least, dozens of external > entity files. And the possibilities for namespaced attribute combinations > are so numerous that constructing a content model to represent all of those > possibilities seems a daunting proposition. > > If all of this is true, what have I really gained by the use of namespaces? > Merely protection against the (rare?) possibility of a name collision? > Seems like a lot of overhead to avoid what could be an infrequent problem. > > And if the namespace URI does point to a DTD, is there a parser that *will* > use that DTD as an aid to validation of that part of the document? What you are looking for is the ISO "architectural forms" paradigm. Architectural forms provide a way to syntactically validate documents that use multiple vocabularies, against the intrinsic syntactic requirements of all of the "inherited" vocabularies. (As a matter of fact, I was just speaking about this last Sunday at the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society Conference here in Dallas, at the invitation of Electronic Laser Forms.) I suggest you take a look at http://www.hytime.org/htnews.html. There is a link to a version of the SP parser that will validate XML documents that contain base architecture declarations, a very simple "hello world" type example, and some miscellaneous explanatory materials. Also, Chapters 9-11 of: Megginson, David. Structuring XML Documents. Charles F. Goldfarb Series on Open Information Management. [Subseries:] The Definitive XML Series from Charles F. Goldfarb. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, [March] 1998. Extent: xxxviii + 425 pages, CDROM. ISBN: 0-13-642299-3. Price: US $39.95. XML Namespaces are not involved in architectural forms. Architectural forms are simply a more sophisticated (and did I mention internationally standardized?) way of doing multiple information architecture inheritance in XML. -Steve -- Steven R. Newcomb, President, TechnoTeacher, Inc. srn@t... http://www.techno.com ftp.techno.com voice: +1 972 517 7954 fax +1 972 517 4571 Suite 211 7101 Chase Oaks Boulevard Plano, Texas 75025 USA *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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