xml-dev - RE: EMBED and validation

["Mark L. Fussell" <fussellm@alumni.caltech.edu>]

Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> >Note, of course, that an application may  also want to run a validating
> >parser over the targets of HREF and JUMBO can do this as well.

David Durant wrote:
> sure... it could, but that would be odd, since you can't include a _valid_
> XML document into either a valid or a well-formed document, since the
> Doctype delcaration is not legal in the isntance. 

I think Peter Murray-Rust was suggesting that a running application may 
want to subsequently read in and process another XML document based on a 
reference to it (at a semantic level) in a first document.  That is at a 
stage after the actual "Parsing", but not very far after (in MONDO it is 
called Building) because the application simply wants to see all the 
information together when the stage is done.

As people have mentioned, one of the difficulties is in seperating what 
SGML and XML as "parsers"/technology do from what SGML and XML as 
"concepts" (all the possible applications) encompass.  I think the terms 
are commonly used as concepts and only rarely used to mean the precise 
technology.  As precise technology XML is currently just a 
semi-configurable parser specification, so what ever back end you want to 
place on a parser is up to you.  The rest is all nebulous "spirit".

I think this is a bit difficient.  Even if flexibility should be allowed, 
some precise definition of the goals and meaning of XML markup would be 
useful to those building applications.  Having a general parser is not 
that useful (parsers are pretty easy to create nowadays), but having a 
general model for encoding information and interpretting the meaning of 
that information (I feel) is extremely useful.  

A standardized DTD plus common applications for that DTD provide an 
interpretation for a particular domain (either large [TEI] or small 
[HTML]).  I believe MONDO provides a useful overall picture that provides 
structure and meaning even before the applications have been developed.

--Mark
mark.fussell@chimu.com



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