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

[Danny Vint <dvint@slip.net>]

>The official is Dan Connoly and the article is
>http://xhtml.waptechinfo.com/extxhtml/
>
>"The following quote shows the heart of the matter:-
>'My experience leads me to believe that parts of XML are solid architectural
>inrfastructure for the long term: tags and attributes, and namespaces. But
>other parts of it are there to manage the transition from the existing
>software base: DTDs, entities, processing instructions, and I don't
>recommend investing them unless you are constrained by existing software
>somehow.' - Dan Connolly,
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Aug/0052.html.
>

Isn't this one of the reasons to try and move XML to the ISO standards
process? I want to build on technology that is going to move forward but
not at the cost of breaking implementations from the past or at the very
least be able to accept data from the past.

One of the key mantras of the SGML days was to let me own my data and not
get caught in featureitise and incompatibility that a year from now might
make my data unaccessible because it is in a format that is no longer
understood. At least this is an ASCII/Unicode format so I don't have to
worry about only having a binary (read proprietary) format laying around;
that's one step forward from what we have but I certainly don't want to
keep changing my format every year just to keep up with XML or Schemas or
where ever all this ends up in the future.

..dan
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Danny Vint
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