Re: PSVI

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

Tim Bray said -

>
> Of course the great risk in this kind of thinking is that you
> start to believe that in general you have to apply a schema
> before you can start to do useful work with a chunk of XML.
> Another example is from a post here by Andrew Layman from 16
> September 1999:
>
>   Elements defined by a schema, when used in an instance document
>   in a validating processor, will have these default values available,
>   and this fact is pertinent to the author of the document.  This
>   means that an element is incompletely read if the schema for it is
>   not read.

When you put it this way, it sounds much like the case of a #FIXED attribute
in a DTD.  If the processor doesn't read the DTD, the attribute won't get set.
But if the document author makes sure to include the attribute, it doesn't
matter if the DTD is skipped.

It seems as if there should be an indication, similar to "standalone", that
would indicate whether a particular document is incomplete because a DTD or
schema is supplying needed values.  Maybe there should be another flag that
says whether types matter in the document.  If they don't, you don't need to
do schema processing to get a "PSVI".  You can create it forthwith and get on
with your work.

Cheers,

Tom P