Re: Schemas and entities (was "And the DTD says, "I'm NOT dead yet!!")

[Marcus Carr <mrc@allette.com.au>]

Henry S. Thompson wrote:

> Sorry this takes you by surprise, and with a negative response.  We
> think it's a _very_ important property of XML Schema that it builds on
> _top_ of XML 1.0 plus Namespaces, and starts where they leave off,
> rather than starting all over again at the level of BNFs for character
> sequences.  Providing the latter would have _considerably_ increased
> the size of an already large spec.

I can certainly accept that, and in general I don't object to the idea of
modularising the various processing stages. I think I now see how schemas
replace DTDs - please correct me if I'm wrong. In the event that I wanted to
employ a dataflow that involved general entities that did more than just string
replacement, I would have to:
  a)  create an instance with entities,
  b)  process my instance against a DTD,
  c)  use some means to insert namespaces,
  d)  validate with a schema-driven processor.

The new dataflow appears to be:
  a)  create an instance that uses namespaces but not entities,
  b)  validate with a schema-driven processor.

Logically, I shouldn't use entities, because I'd be required to employ a process
that doesn't play with namespaces or schemas, so I'd need to do a lot more
fiddling. On the other hand, if it's important that I use entities I still can,
as long as I'm prepared to put up with managing a sloppy set of processes. Is
that a fair summary of the situation?


--
Regards,

Marcus Carr                      email:  mrc@allette.com.au
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Allette Systems (Australia)      www:    http://www.allette.com.au
___________________________________________________________________
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
       - Einstein