Re: [xml-dev] DTDs, W3C Schemas, RELAX NG, Schematron?

[Arjun Ray <aray@nyct.net>]

"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com> wrote:

|> DTDs for entities and other such things are probably dying.

Mainly from a lack of understanding.  

| I can't say I will mourn those.

For text entities ("parsed entities" in XML-lingo), I agree.   But I've
found notated entities very useful.  That's a closed door to XML, though,
because it doesn't have data attributes. 

| They have always been hard to explain to a reasonable programmer and 
| close to impossible to the technical writers until they use them for 
| awhile.  

For text entities, much of the time I've found the light going on at the
mention of '#define' and '#include'.  Notated entities have been much more
difficult.  In general, I've found comprehension severely compromised by
prior exposure - almost inevitable - to the tag soup of the HTML world.
"What's the big deal with all these tags?"[1] degenerates into "why can't
everything be a tag?"[2]   

So, it's open season for reinvention.

[1] See the first Q/A in Part 5 of: 
http://www.flightlab.com/~joe/sgml/faq-not.txt

[2] See this example of "helpful" documentation, wherein the anxious are
offered the relief that something doesn't "require a closing tag": 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/objects/doctype.asp