xml-dev - Re: Question About Namespaces and DTDs

["Paul W. Abrahams" <abrahams@valinet.com>]

Joe English wrote:

> Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>
> > At 12:31 PM 7/25/00 -0400, Norman Walsh wrote:
> > > A schema language that's namespace aware is the answer.
> >
> > I have to admit that there are still too many days I wish someone had sat
> > down and made DTDs namespace aware.  It still doesn't seem that impossible
> > a thing to do, though it's probably been too late for a long while.
>
> Maybe it would suffice to leave DTDs as they are,
> and build a namespace-aware DTD-based *validator*.
>
> It might work something like this: A document could
> indicate that a particular namespace URI is bound
> to a DTD via a processing instruction:
>
>     <?xml-schema
>         href="urn:ndw:doctypes:docbook:3.1.7"
>         type="application/xml-dtd"
>     ?>
>
> The 'xml-schema' PI target is analogous to the 'xml-stylesheet'
> target defined in [REC-xml-stylesheet].  The 'type' pseudo-attribute
> indicates that the schema uses XML DTD notation (not sure what
> the right MIME type for this is, if any).  The 'href' pseudo-attribute
> specifies a URI for the schema.

I like the idea of what you're trying to do, but giving particular PIs an
essential function in XML seems to me the wrong way to go.   I've wondered
about adding an optional component to an entity declaration that would supply a
specified implicit prefix to all unprefixed element names within the entity.
That would make it possible to use a single resource (file, URI, etc.) for a
DTD that would be reusable with different prefixes.

Paul Abrahams