RE: And the DTD says, "I'm NOT dead yet!!"

[Danny Vint <dvint@slip.net>]

>
>Clarity.  Enough "minimum victory" visions.  
>If the W3C can get rid of DTDs, do it.  Otherwise, 
>they are playing a formal role in the 
>definitions of application languages of 
>which XML Schema is one.  
>
>Len 
>http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

I agree, it seems a little strange that you go to a Schema presentation and
the first thing is said that DTDs are terrible and they are dead anyway.
Let me rant on the terrible - the recent presentation that I saw criticized
DTDs for being bad because they only allowed OR and ordered groups (no
AND), but yet this was a decision of the XML team to make life easier to
remove the & from the SGML content model. We then went on to compare a
simple 5 or 6 line easily readable DTD to expand it into about 30 lines of
Schema declaration (not counting any documentation elements). I then get a
kick out of the fact that a DTD is used to formalize (or at least drive
tools) to maintain a Schema design as an instance of a DTD!

Anyway, yes DTDs are missing data type other than strings, but in most
cases for documents (another segment of the world here - not everything is
web and business applications) this is all that is needed. Yeah I might use
a Schema to track in one format more information about my DTD and the data
types and documentation but I would then generate a nice simple DTD to use
for my publications. 

Are we seriously thinking that CALS, DocBook, etc are going to be rewritten
as full Schema applications? What's the value in doing that?

If someone is going to depricate and maybe eventually remove all these
other SGML features that were listed, then we need to start by setting a
different set of goals - seems to me a key feature was interpretability
with SGML and at least not making it impossible to move from one to the other.

..dan

>
>Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
>Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk [mailto:ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk]
>Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2001 5:48 AM
>To: Bullard, Claude L (Len)
>Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
>Subject: Re: And the DTD says, "I'm NOT dead yet!!"
>
>
>"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com> writes:
>
><snip/>, wrt XML Schema
>
>> Elsewhere
>> 
>> "Although this DTD is non-normative, any XML document which is not valid
>per
>> this DTD, given redefinitions in its internal subset of the 'p' and 's'
>> parameter entities below appropriate to its namespace declaration of the
>XML
>> Schema namespace, is almost certainly not a valid schema document, with
>the
>> exception of documents with multiple namespace prefixes for the XML Schema
>> namespace itself"
>> 
>> Having just read another round of "DTDs are Dead and 
>> Deserve to Be" in an article prominently quoting 
>> a W3C official who is in charge of architectures, 
>> why is that there?
>
>1) Just what is it that you think is inappropriate about the above?
>2) What 'W3C official' and what article?
>
>ht
>-- 
>  Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
>          W3C Fellow 1999--2001, part-time member of W3C Team
>     2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
>	    Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
>		     URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/

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Danny Vint
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Author: "SGML at Work"  
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