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RE: RDDL (was RE: Negotiate Out The Noise)

• To: "'xml-dev@l...'" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: RDDL (was RE: Negotiate Out The Noise)
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: 18 Jan 2002 12:58:28 -0500
• In-reply-to: <575CBD83AE7DD411A23500B0D049C2F941A42F@SRVSOCRATE>
• References: <575CBD83AE7DD411A23500B0D049C2F941A42F@SRVSOCRATE>

On Fri, 2002-01-18 at 11:09, Nicolas LEHUEN wrote:
> A document type cannot be guessed from the list of namespaces it uses.

I don't really believe in such things as document types - though I
suppose you're correct that a mere list of namespaces is inadequate if
you really want to nail down precisely what type of document it might
be, since the list doesn't define the possible interactions.  Only the
document itself really does that...

> There
> should be a way to bind a document to a series of meta-data resources,
and
> that's what I thought RDDL should be.

I gave that a go once with XPDL:
http://www.simonstl.com/projects/xpdl/

There's also the XHTML meta tag and its cousins if you want to go that
route.

> But it is not, it is only a way to
> bind resources to a given namespace. If I followed your logic, to
validate a
> RDDL document using RDDL, I would load the RDDL for the XHTML, RDDL
and
> XLink namespaces. Now I don't have one, but three resources
directories in
> which I'm supposed to find a DTD. Great, I've got three : the DTD for
XHTML,
> the DTD for RDDL, and the DTD for XLink. How do I make my computer
select
> the good one, i.e. the RDDL DTD, instead of the two other (and
especially
> the XHTML one, since the root element html

That's not a problem of RDDL - that's a general validation issue. 
Schema mathematics (except for RELAX NG) are currently wretched.  I'd
like to see RDDL files contain modules which only describe their
particular namespace, not the entire concoction.  Using those is
currently difficult, however, so we're stuck with what we've got.

Incremental progress, not the perfect solution you appear to be seeking.

> xmlns="xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" is found in both XHTML and
RDDL
> ?).

Yep.  That's the current sad state of the schema art.


> You bet it will ! As soon as someone will try to use RDDL for RDDL,
> XHTML+SVG, XHTML+MathML, people will begin to discover that a
namespace is
> not a document type, and that mixing different namespaces in the same
> document create new document types, different from each original
'default
> document types' possibly associated to the namespace. From there, they
will
> throw out RDDL and try to think seriously about the problem.

Nah.  Maybe they'll get rid of their expectations about schemas and/or
the whole fuzzy notion of document types instead.

It sounds like you want a complete solution.  I don't think there are
any complete solutions in XML, just a box of parts.  Change your
expectations, and you might be a lot happier.
 
-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com

• References:
  • RE: RDDL (was RE: Negotiate Out The Noise)
    • From: Nicolas LEHUEN <nicolas.lehuen@u...>

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