[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: And the DTD says, "I'm NOT dead yet!!"
Dan had to insist on people cleaning up a mess the HTML users insisted on making. Dan worked his buns off to make sure HTML was valid SGML. No question of that. If he regrets that, he is angst-ridden without cause. Markup discipline comes with benefits but any rigorous practice consumes resources. So let's be clear: the problem was not in DTDs; it was in the application design. For what they are designed to do, DTDs work. They don't do enough. Thus, schemas. As application languages with DTD-valid ROAs, meta-schemas work. If the DTD is ever to be replaced for that purpose, someone has to explain why it is broken. The article doesn't disturb me. It was sent to me from a different list discussing schemas as "food for thought". I was being asked to consider DTDs as unnecessary. It prompts me to react because as Simon observes, we end up having to explain this stuff. Henry says DTDs will be around for quite a while. Ok. That makes it easy to explain why the DTD is there even if not why it is non-normative. That still makes no sense to me. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Sean B. Palmer [mailto:sean@m...] Sent: Monday, January 08, 2001 7:26 AM To: Bullard, Claude L (Len) Cc: Henry S. Thompson; xml-dev@l... Subject: Re: And the DTD says, "I'm NOT dead yet!!" Len Wrote:- > The official is Dan Connoly and the article is > http://xhtml.waptechinfo.com/extxhtml/ Ugh, that's one of mine (nice to know that people are still reading it). Onwards: > Huh? I know, I know, it's not the clearest article I've ever written, and it's hideously out of date now anyway. What I was trying to say is that XML Schemas have a much wider function than DTDs: they do different things. The fact that they both are systems for constraining data models of XML is a bit confusing to some people (including myself when I wrote the article, evidently), but the simple truth is that XML Schemas are more expressive than DTDs. Doesn't mean they will "eradicate" them..... but imagine if the initial Web had had XML Schemas and namespaces etc. in the first place? I think that the Web might be a better place for it, with more people validating their code etc. Don't ask me to back that up with any facts; no one can change the past, and any speculations about it are just that - speculation...but that is my opinion (subject to change every 5 minutes). However, remember how much trouble Dan (Connolly) had in getting people to validate their code, and make it SGML compliant? I expect that he regrets doing that now, and is trying to make "amends" by stabilizing things somewhat and renouncing the SGML past. But that is just speculation once again on my part... Why don't you ask him? So I think he is right, but only in the context of his 10 years of Web experience... here from the very beginning. Like all of us, he has seen the corruption of the Web through non-validation crappy HTML coding... I wonder what's next? Kindest Regards, Sean B. Palmer http://infomesh.net/sbp/ http://www.w3.org/WAI/ [ERT/GL/PF] "Perhaps, but let's not get bogged down in semantics." - Homer J. Simpson, BABF07.
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