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

[ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson)]

"Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com> writes:

> > That makes it easy to explain why the DTD
> > is there even if not why it is non-normative.
> > That still makes no sense to me.
> 
> I'm quite sure what you're implying there...DTDs are non normative? Huh?
> Forgive my ignorance, but I thought that the DTD format was laid out in the
> SGML ISO specification...probably not.

It's the DTD for Schemas which is non-normative _as far as the Schema_
_spec is concerned_.  That is, we choose to make the DTD non-normative 
to avoid having to rule on questions of the form

  The Schema for Schemas says X, the DTD for Schemas says X', which
   should I pay attention to?

By making the D4S non-normative, we can just say "if you think there's 
a conflict, you're probably wrong, but it doesn't matter, just go with 
the S4S".

Also, at the margin, there are valid schema documents which are
schema-valid wrt the S4S but not XML 1.0-valid wrt the D4S, namely
those which use two or more prefixes for the XML Schema namespace.

ht
-- 
  Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
          W3C Fellow 1999--2001, part-time member of W3C Team
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