[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: DTD's
5/17/01 11:42:52 AM, Sandra Carney <scarney@e...> wrote: >Hi, > We have a question about the necessity of DTD. There are folks > among our developers who postulate that so long as the document > is well-formed, we don't need DTD's. So far, so true. However, > might this pose a quality problem later on especially if you want > to limit what are considered legitimate tags in the document? If more than one person is going to write code that has to process your documents, or generate your type of documents, or if more than one person has to create your type of documents by hand, or if only one person is involved but there isn't concrete evidence that he/she can survive being run over by a truck, then you're going to need some sort of formal and precise description of how your documents are supposed to be structured. Writing a DTD or other type of schema (XSD, RELAX, TREX, etc.) is usually a far easier way of getting this description than writing a tedious prose description of which elements can be contained where (you still need to write a prose description of what the various structures *mean*, but this is far less tedious). If you try to go the purely informal route, then you're going to wind up with Person A writing code to generate documents that can't be processed by the code that Person B wrote, with both Person A and Person B claiming that they did the job correctly and the other one didn't. If your documents have to cross organizational boundaries, such problems are tremendously magnified. IMHO, the main value of a DTD or other schema isn't in enabling machine validation of documents; it's in making sure that people are all on the same wavelength.
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