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At 9:53 AM +1000 4/5/02, Marcus Carr wrote:
>... and SVG as well, but those DTDs aren't subject to change based on the
>contents or requirements of the instance. Using a more document-oriented DTD,
>inclusion of a fragment of data from a different namespace involves modifying
>the DTD. This may not be practical even though it is possible.
>
OK. You want a little more than simply validating against the URI
instead of the prefix. You want to be able to mix vocabularies and
still have the document validate. I think your real argument then is
with the conservative nature of DTD validation (Everything not
permitted is forbidden) rather than with namespaces. The same
problems would arise without namespaces; e.g. if we were to mix a
namespace-less well-formed HTML with the namespace-less MathML 1.0.
However, even here modularization with parameter entities does make
it possible to do what I think you want. You can validate XHTML plus
MathML or XHTML plus SVG. You just need to use a master DTD that
pulls in both individual DTDs and redefines the parameter entity
referenced accordingly to add one batch of elements to the content
specifications of the other batch of elements. It's messy, but it
does work.
But again, this really has nothing to do with namespaces. It's a
question of mixing multiple vocabularies, and you'd have the same
problems with or without namespaces.
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| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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