xml-dev - Re: Why ANY is so restrictive?

[Toby Speight <Toby.Speight@streapadair.freeserve.co.uk>]

Paul> Paul Tchistopolskii <URL:mailto:paul@qub.com>

Paul quoted:

>> ANY means any *declared* element.  You still have to declare the
>> elements, and when you declare the elements, you have to declare
>> what their contents can be.


0> In article <00c301bf7372$28616240$5df5c13f@PaulTchistopolskii>,
0> Paul wrote:

Paul> About one year ago I have posted the letter to XML-dev list
Paul> asking was there some practical reason behind making 'ANY' so
Paul> restrictive in XML v 1.0.
Paul>
Paul> I proposed to change the semantics of ANY to 'anything well-formed
Paul> is fine'.
Paul>
Paul> There was a silence on this topic. I got no explanation why ANY
Paul> is so restrictive.
Paul>
Paul> Maybe now somebody would try to explain what was the purpose of
Paul> such a restrictive 'ANY' in XML 1.0?

Because if ANY allowed any well-formed content, you could have a valid
XML document which was not SGML-valid.  The idea of valid XML is that
it can be processed by an SGML parser with an appropriate declaration;
the concept of "well-formed" was invented to allow non-SGML processing
of XML.

I suggest you concentrate your efforts on other schema types than
DTDs, as these other schema types generally apply to all well-formed
XML (not only valid), and may be able to specify what you want.

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