What are schemata

[Simon St.Laurent]

Tim Bray wrote:
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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.
-----------------------------

I think focusing on elements and attributes is an excellent idea.  I'd like to 
see XSchemas applicable to fragments as well as to documents. I've been 
pondering this in connection to some object store ideas I had while writing 
that Building the Filesystem into the File paper a few months ago.

'Documents' in the traditional sense are still popular, but I don't know how 
much longer we'll really be working with them.  I think fragments, subsets, 
and combinations are going to be much more popular in the reasonably near 
future.

Compound documents and partial validation are a fact of life, or will be once 
XML, XLink, and XPointer receive more widespread usage.  I think we can 
prepare XSchemas to support these (partial validation is easier) without 
turning somersaults and cartwheels simultaneously.

Simon St.Laurent
Dynamic HTML: A Primer / XML: A Primer / Cookies


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