XML is broken (was Re: Why Doesn't IE5 use the DTD toValidate?)

[Rick Jelliffe]

From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl at simonstl.com>

>I'm hardly new to XML; it's just taken me about two years to come to
the
>conclusion that some things are irreparably broken.

Rubbish. You have been saying this on and off for the entire time you
have
been on XML-DEV Simon :-)  And every time you do, everyone replies with
variants of "X was really helpful" or "I found X quite useful" or "I
didnt find X
particularly useful" or even "X didn't help me" and everyone agrees "it
would
be nice to have more".   It is becoming a ritual.

The problems you mention come down to the same two, unless I am missing
something:

* There is currently no convention to name the effective document type
definition
and prevent extensibility using the internal subset.

* XML has no data-typing (esp. on attributes and data content).

The first is hardly surprising: it allows extensibility with strong
typing (but its
managebility is weak). Solutions (e.g. from HyTime) to this have been
suggested
at intervals, but to no avail.

The second is the oldest complaint in the book; and the oldest answer in
the book
is "that is the trouble with layered, distributed  development:
sometimes layers lag
or cannot be agreed on"  (actually, all the consortia who are
making families of DTDs in their particular domains are defining data
types that they consider appropriate). The W3C Schema WG, of course,
also
works in this area.

Rick Jelliffe


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