Re: How to get the 1st element in DTDD

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Murali Mani wrote:
> Yes, doc should be initialized by an XML document, this is a wierd part of
> XML, DOCTYPE declaration comes with the XML Document, and you cannot
> specify DOCTYPE as part of the DTD.

I'm not clear why you'd want to specify it in both places.

> Other things --
> I have always *very* strongly felt that the possible root elements of a
> document should be specified in the DTD/schema -- this is exactly what we
> do in regular tree grammars.

Conventionally the default root element type would be the one
element type whose name did *not* appear in any content model,
and could therefore be assumed to be the root element type,
which is why many DTD compilers pop up a box after the compile
to say "this looks like the root element type", please confirm.

But any element type can be the root of a document. There is
nothing wrong with an XHTML fragment which starts

   <!DOCTYPE p SYSTEM "xhtml-whatever.dtd">
   <p>...</p>

Or do you want to prohibit this kind of thing and only allow a
subset of element types to be usable as roots? 

///Peter