xml-dev - Re: Does DTD validation work with namespaces?

[Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>]

"Paul W. Abrahams" wrote:
 
> Can one find that "fairly explicit assumption" in any W3C document?  If so,
> which one, and precisely where?

The point is that many people do not share that assumption (that if you
use namespaces you will not be using DTDs).  You can use namespaced
names with DTDs with no change in practice at all: every name can only
have one meaning.  If you want to use DTDs for documents where the same
name is used in one context for one content model and in another context
(e.g. a different namespace) for a different content model, you cannot
do it.  So having namespaces does not add any limitations to what you
can express with DTDs.

But many of the developers of namespaces were interested in going beyond
what DTDs could provide.  It is putting the cart before the horse to
complain that namespaces can do things that DTDs cannot model:
namespaces were invented largely because of the need to go beyond DTDs.  


Rick Jelliffe