Roots of the DTD

[John Cowan]

Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> Perhaps the simplest way to deal with this is to leave roots _out_ of the
> XSchema PI. I always thought it was kind of silly to declare it in DOCTYPE -
> after all, the root element should be the first and last thing you see in a
> document, and an application should be able to figure it out.  It seems to me
> like redundancy, though there may be reasons for it which I haven't fathomed.

Well, redundancy is the basis of validation: no redundancy, nothing
to validate against (validation really = internal consistency, since
the DTD is part of the document logically).

But I agree that redundancy within the document entity doesn't buy
that much, as opposed to redundancy between the doc entity and the
external DTD/XSchema entity.  So for my part, the root attribute
goes.

This, I think, is also an argument against internal XSchema subsets
unless limited to entity declarations.  Entity declarations provide
essential as opposed to redundant information.

And that said, with system identifiers URIs, it's just as
easy to put your local entity declarations for foo.xml into
foo.entities.xml, a small XSchema.  Of course, to do that we must
be able to have multiple XSchema PIs or else XSchema inclusion,
or preferably both.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan at ccil.org
	You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
	You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
		Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)

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