Re: [xml-dev] Re: Flexible Schemas (was RE: [xml-dev] The task tobe solved by RDDL)

"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:

> Speaking for myself only, I find the notion of "document type" to be a
> mistake in itself, an odd relic of programmers' expectations of
> tightly-controlled data formats.  If you find it more useful to
> categorize every acceptable combination of parts from different
> namespaces, you're welcome to do so, of course.

I think "document type" is much more useful if you don't think of it as
being a single root element, but rather a collection of root elements
that provide different views into the same set of elements.

> Just keep in mind that a few of us find "the bigger problem of
> associating meta-data to document types" to be much less interesting and
> less useful than "what is this namespace supposed to tell me?"

One of the useful things about such meta-data is it provides yet another
layer of context into the use of the namespace. Yes, it is interesting
to know that XHTML provides human-readable stuff in HTML format, but the
enclosing metadata tells you what that human-readable stuff is
describing (a part, a restaurant, a bug). I don't think you can say one
is more interesting than the other.

-- Ron