Re: How to get the 1st element in DTDD

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

Murali Mani wrote:

> Thanks. actually that makes lot of sense... especially your schema
> describes an inventory of lot of stuff, even quite unrelated..??

Yes, if your focus is on what could be termed as fielded information, this might
be less relevant, but there is a lot of narrative data being created in XML as
well.

> but actually do you have a concrete example when this might actually
> happen... that will be good...

Sure - you may have numerous authors working on a single document. They may each
be writing a chapter, then the book will be validated in it's entirety.

Another example - the tool of choice for many markup people is a text editor, but
when it comes to tables, they often prefer to use an editor that provides visual
support. (CALS syntax is doable but difficult without.) External entities are
used to provide a placeholder for the table markup in the main document and the
tables are created and validated independently. The final step is a normalisation
of the document, generally (but not necessarily) pulling everything into one
file.

These are real-world examples - we have been doing both as standard practice for
ten years. Limiting the root elements would diminish the effectiveness of data
creators. I'm guessing that you feel there are downstream processes that would
benefit from limiting the set of possible root elements - if so, could you
explain what they might be and how they would benefit?


--
Regards,

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