[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Identify PUBLICID outside of dtd?
Tim Bray <tbray@t...> wrote: | 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). I don't think SGML had that idea - at least, the text of ISO 8879 doesn't support this notion (AFAIK). It was, however, a popular *convention* to treat the syntax of external subset inclusion as a purely "referential" device. (Strictly, a DTD is never "gotten to" - its actual specification is in the contents of the document type declaration.) Using an FPI for a document type as an abstraction needs a public text class of NOTATION. | 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. The mistake would seem to be the recurring failure to formalize a way to *refer* to abstractions such as "document types", and to concretes such as schemas/DTDs which are *not* syntactic components of a document instance (as by contrast the effective contents of a document type declaration are.)
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|