Re: DTD's

[Jeff Greif <jgreif@alumni.princeton.edu>]

Depends on the application.

If all your XML documents are generated by the same program and consumed by
the same program, they merely need to agree on what to expect.  A DTD is a
way of documenting this agreement, but it need not be present when the
document is actually created or read.

However, if

 -- there are multiple reader programs or multiple generators, which undergo
maintenance and successive versions, possibly getting out of sync with one
another,
 -- the documents are created by people who might make mistakes in producing
them,
 -- there is some audit-trail requirement or requirement of traceabilty to a
spec

then the documents should be validated against a DTD or XML Schema or
something equivalent, particularly if there is some kind of trust
relationship required between the creating and reading entities.

Jeff

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sandra Carney" <scarney@endocardial.com>
To: "XML Development" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 9:42 AM
Subject: DTD's


> Hi,
>   We have a question about the necessity of DTD.  There are folks
>   among our developers who postulate that so long as the document
>   is well-formed, we don't need DTD's.