[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Doctypes again (was Re: Documents within documents)
For me, the most compelling use for (the notion of) document type is as a contract. A document type declaration asserts that a document's syntax follows some set of rules to express the document creator's intended semantics. With namespaces used, as you point out, for defining modular vocabularies, I agree with you that a root node's namespace + name has problems as a document type, since it is not specific enough a contract for many cases. RELAX NG, I think, does go a long ways toward expressing syntactical rules, but some rules may only be expressible (is that a word?) in procedural code, prose, hand waving, scribbles on napkins ... Packaging RELAX NG schemas or other processing resources with an instance doesn't work too well when viewing doctype as contract. It feels kind of like sending a new contract with each shipment. (Of course, DTD internal subsets fail in this regard, as well.) Best, Bill Michael Brennan wrote: > And I still want to kill off DTDs. I've just come around to the > understanding that we have to be sure we are adequately addressing all of > the use cases they serve before we do so -- and XML Schema is clearly not a > DTD killer, but perhaps RELAX NG is.
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