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Re: DTD's

• From: Jeff Greif <jgreif@a...>
• To: Sandra Carney <scarney@e...>,XML Development <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 11:05:33 -0700

Depends on the application.

If all your XML documents are generated by the same program and consumed by
the same program, they merely need to agree on what to expect.  A DTD is a
way of documenting this agreement, but it need not be present when the
document is actually created or read.

However, if

 -- there are multiple reader programs or multiple generators, which undergo
maintenance and successive versions, possibly getting out of sync with one
another,
 -- the documents are created by people who might make mistakes in producing
them,
 -- there is some audit-trail requirement or requirement of traceabilty to a
spec

then the documents should be validated against a DTD or XML Schema or
something equivalent, particularly if there is some kind of trust
relationship required between the creating and reading entities.

Jeff

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sandra Carney" <scarney@e...>
To: "XML Development" <xml-dev@l...>
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 9:42 AM
Subject: DTD's


> 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.

• References:
  • DTD's
    • From: Sandra Carney <scarney@e...>

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