Use of "ANY"

["I-Lin Kuo" <ikuoikuo@hotmail.com>]

Hi,

I need some advice on the following problem:

My organization has a DTD to which some people would like to add 
presentations tags to. There is another camp which opposes this as a bad 
idea, but the two have compromised on a set of 9 tags from TEI (Text 
Encoding Initiative).

As one of the technical people charged to implement this, I find this a bad 
idea, and would like to propose the following alternative solution:

--- Limit the use of presentation tags within a small subset of elements. 
For this subset of elements, specify the ELEMENTS contents as ANY instead of 
the list of presentation tags.

  I believe this solution has the benefit of allowing the pro-presentation 
camp to use whatever tags they want while removing us from the business of 
specifying presentation tags altogether. Instead, the decision of what 
presentation tags to support is left to the XSLT designer.
  Furthermore, this solution also removes a technical obstacle as we 
transition our DTD to XSD, because the TEI specification is a DTD and there 
are too many problems validating against a mix of XSD and DTD. Using ANY 
removes the need to validate within that element.

  Are there any counter arguments to this approach?

  One major point raised in discussion is that there is a bias against the 
use of "ANY". A DTD with "ANY" would be viewed as unfinished, and would be 
an obstacle to having our DTD approved by an organization such as OASIS. Is 
this true? I am not an experienced schema designer, but it seems like 
precluding the use of "ANY" contradicts the extensibility of XML, as I don't 
see how user-defined extensions are possible without the use of "ANY"

  Thanks in advance for any insight on this.





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