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RE: Identify PUBLICID outside of dtd?

• To: "Tim Bray" <tbray@t...>
• Subject: RE: Identify PUBLICID outside of dtd?
• From: "Chris Wilper" <cwilper@c...>
• Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 14:10:15 -0400
• Cc: <xml-dev@l...>
• Thread-index: AcJ0bUGlJAtvaJS+TH2wAuQJi4LxaQAANsUA
• Thread-topic: Identify PUBLICID outside of dtd?

> What's a doctype?  SGML had the idea that you could 
> get to the DTD from 

The idea that Johnathan Borden brought up a while back
http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200201/msg01271.html
that an RDDL purpose might be used to define a doctype
is more along the lines of what I'm thinking.

It seems that a doctype exists for every element
that can be used as a root element in a document.
Since an element can be defined as belonging
to a namespace, a corresponding doctype could
similarly be defined -- and would naturally fit
within the same namespace, but not have the
same name (not sure how its name might be
decided...).

Then there is the issue of the "document type"
having identity outside of the context of its namespace.
I guess some kind of QName-to-URI mapping
http://www.openhealth.org/RDF/QNameToURI.htm
(thanks, google) would be useful for that.

- Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@t...]
Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2002 1:07 PM
To: Chris Wilper
Cc: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re:  Identify PUBLICID outside of dtd?


Chris Wilper wrote:

>  I'm thinking that having a URI to identify a 
> doctype would ... be good...  Whether the format would be
> registered with IANA or not is another issue.

What's a doctype?  SGML had the idea that you could get to the DTD from 
the Public or System identifier, and that's all you could get to 
(automatically).  RDDL tries to deal with the reality that a "document 
type", if such a thing exists, involves more than one schema in one 
language.  To be fair, the SGML people always said that the DTD formally 
included all the human-readable documentation; RDDL is trying to 
automate that.  There was a brief wave of enthusiasm a couple of years 
ago from people who wanted to repeat SGML's mistake of placing the 
schema (i.e. a bundle of syntax constraints) at the center of 
everything, but we seem to have gotten over that. -Tim

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