xml-dev - RE: DTDs aren't going away even when schemas arrive (was Re: Aretheresti

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

Michael Champion wrote:

>So whatever the future of schemas for declaring constraints on
> document structure and content, DTDs aren't going away in the forseeable
> future as the place to make such declarations.
>
> And the question of how to handle the case where both the DTD and schema
> contain content model constraints is not easy to answer.  I write this
> [sorry, Lauren!] while listening to the DOM WG beat their
> collective heads
> against the wall trying to figure this out ... and lets not even
> talk about
> the little nuggets of complexity that namespaces throw into this
> toxic stew.
>

	At the very very least DTDs need to be retrofitted to handle namespaces. I
would say, add no new functionality, allow me to use DTDs as they otherwise
currently exist, with documents that use namespaces.

The issues:
1) need to define namespace prefix bindings in the DTD, at least for local
DTD purposes
2) the DTD declaration will depend on the expanded name, not the
prefix:local name in the literal sense as it currently stands.

Jonathan Borden
The Open Healthcare Group
http://www.openhealth.org