AFs and the DPH

Rick Jelliffe ricko at allette.com.au
Thu Oct 2 18:34:56 BST 1997


 
> From: W. Eliot Kimber <eliot at isogen.com>
 
> This is why I think architectures are key to
> the success of XML: it lets you eat the cake of DTD-less documents and
> still have it (because the architecture processing gives you all the
> validation and processing you need, but only when you want it and not
> when you don't).

This seems a very good and important point.

If the problem is how to represent occassional structures in well-formed
documents, then AFs represent an external form, XML-data represents an
inline form, and ISO 8879 declarations represent a header form. 

But, I think that a document with AFs cannot be regarded as being 
declaration-less, since either the declarations have to be implicitly
built into the application, or be explicit in the form of a DTD outside.

The horrible thing is that, of course, there is no reason why an
XML-data schema could not itself be a meta-DTD!   I think the 
issue of direct modelling (SGML templates or XML-data) versus
indirect modelling (AFs) should be distinguished from the issue
of the goodness of ISO 8879 declaration syntax versus XML-data
non-standard syntax.    AFs, as a mechanism, are syntax-neutral
to a great extent.

Rick Jelliffe



xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)




More information about the Xml-dev mailing list