What are schemata

[Peter Murray-Rust]

At 13:00 31/05/98 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
[...]
>Hmm, this line of thought may be perpetuating what I see as one of
>the shortcomings of DTDs, namely that the DTD has to describe the
>whole document, i.e. a class of languages.  What about partial
>validation/constraints?  I think it's important that child-of-DTD
>support compond documents & partial validation.  So in the terms above,
>maybe these things define sets of elements and attributes, rather
>than whole documents. -Tim

Yes - I have always seen a DTD as a collection of element/attribute
constraints. It only describes a document if the document structure happens
to fit the root element. But very often the it will describe the individual
elements (including their children) and not the whole document. Of course a
parser will regard that as an error at present, but the element-based
approach has still a great deal of value - especially in a namespace context.

	P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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