xml-dev - Re: ignore/include

["Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@allette.com.au>]

From: Fabio Arciniegas A. <l-arcini@uniandes.edu.co>

>I was wondering... is there some way to actually pre-process the DTD
>declaration or bind an include/ignore statement to a condition so we
can
>have a similar behavior for DTDs?.

The keywords INCLUDE and IGNORE can be sourced from a parameter entity.

Parameter entities can be sourced from a WWW resource by specifying a
SYSTEM indentifier, a URL.

The URL could be :
* a static text/plain file with just the appropriate keyword in it (this
file could be sent as part of the same multipart MIME transmission, or
sit on a web server somewhere);

* a CGI script which generates the keywords (i.e., a version control
program or whatever; it could even be a URL which queries the process
which has requested the XML document).

The ISO SGML committee looked at adding more cpp functionality to the
conditional section mechanism. But they were not so enthusiastic,
because three other technologies seemed more promising:

* adopting more class-based systems,

* adding some kind of name scoping to DTDs or DTD entities, and

* using attribute and link names to allow validation of other kinds of
structures that then simple element tree (either by  using element names
or values instead of the element name, or by traversing some kinds of
links, for example to add stronger typing to IDREFs: this is the kind of
thing that is done by "architectural validation").

Rick Jelliffe


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