[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Arbitrary Infoset boundaries (was Re: Common XML - FinalReviewDraft)
Aaron Skonnard wrote: > Once XSD and XInclude are done, DTDs are dead weight for the Infoset. It's > really about the fundamental abstractions that we can infer from XML 1.0 + > Namespaces in light of our current direction. I don't agree. XInclude is no replacement for entity referneces in attribute values or in text-only data content. Neither does it adequately substitute for the ISO public entity sets for special characters: HTML advocates have made it quite clear during the XHTML discussions that the idea that entity references will not go away quickly. (XInclude is a bad idea, if considered alone, because it will fragment XML into XML+XInclude and XML: it would be better to bundle it as part of namespaces and XBase.) A DTD is carted around with a document when the document is considered by its originater to have some life. The DTD represents constraints on the future of the document not just its present. By not including DTDs as part of the infoset or DOM, the W3C groups are making the simplification that the document has reached its terminal state: if it is transformed, it is transformed into another structure. This agrees with XML's premise that it is a resolved document format, rather than a format for documents in progress. SGML gives many features suitable for documents-in-progress: it leaves XML for dead in this because XML was designed for distribution not authoring. XML Schemas may even lead to a resurgence of the use of DTDs: this is because once schema software is in place as a layer, the particular syntax becomes less important. (Of course, where there are features that cannot be supported, that is different. No magic.) Rick Jelliffe
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