True XML compliance (Re: Sean McGrath's posts to XML-L)

[W. E. Perry]

Frank Boumphrey wrote:

> It should be easy to generate a DTD from a well formed document. Does any
> one know of any software out there that does this? Or is there even a need
> for this?
>
> If the answer to the first is no and the answer to the second is Yes then I
> can easily spruce up a small app that I have developed for my own use and
> make it publicly available.
>
> Frank


With respect, my interest (and, I believe, Mr. McGrath's) was not in generating
DTD's from documents but in defining XML compliance for applications as the
ability to accept an XML document plus DTD as input or to generate XML plus DTD
as output. This would mean that, e.g., MS Access would have a File/Import menu
option to open and parse a specified XML document plus DTD and from that input
to create new records in existing tables, create new tables, create and apply
new indices, construct new data views. . ., in short, all of the possibilities
of SQL, and then some, without the dialect traps. This is (or is a big part of)
what I would hope that Microsoft's commitment to XML in Office would mean. Or,
to build on Mr. McGrath's example, graphics editor/publisher program XYZ, while
storing data in its own proprietary binary format, would have, as part of
claiming XML compliance, the option to generate as output from one of its own
files an XML document and corresponding document-specific DTD.

At this level of compliance, XML not only supplants IIOP and COM as 'wire
protocols' in heterogeneous distributed environments, but obviates the binary
vs. text dispute which we have seen in some recent threads.


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