To validate or not to validate, that is the question

[Dan Brickley]

On Mon, 17 Aug 1998, John Cowan wrote:

> Martin Bryan wrote:
> 
> > Why does this group seem to feel there is an overpowering need to develop a
> > DTD that can be used to validate the compound structure, rather than its
> > individual fragments?
> 
> I think your model of "compound document" is too simple.  You seem
> to model it as a set of self-contained fragments enclosed in a
> container.
> 
> I expect to see much more complex documents:  a Chemical ML description
> of a molecule, with (a) embedded HTML English-language documentation,
> which itself contains several inclusions of MathML, and (b) a SMIL
> document that marshals a non-XML movie of the molecule.  How would
> you validate just the HTML part, given that the HTML DTD does not
> understand MathML?

Nice real-life example. The paper 'Web Architecture: Extensible
Languages',  by Tim Berners-Lee & Dan Connolly, URL:

	http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-webarch-extlang

... has a number more and discusses broader motivations for tackling
this. In particular http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-webarch-extlang#Mixing
should be of interest.

Dan





--
Daniel.Brickley at bristol.ac.uk                           
Institute for Learning and Research Technology   http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
University of Bristol,  Bristol BS8 1TN, UK.     tel: +44(0)117 9288478



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