Compound Documents - necessary for success?

[David Megginson]

Chris von See writes:

 > Without a DTD or schema on which to "hang your hat", so to speak,
 > you're vesting the application with the knowledge of what the
 > various namespace-qualified constructs mean.  This strikes me as a
 > Very Bad Thing, because it leaves individual applications to
 > interpret (potentially, interpret very differently) what a
 > particular attribute or element means.

The situation that Chris describes exists with or without a DTD.
Imagine that I have a DTD containing the following:

  <!ELEMENT body (title, p+)>
  <!ELEMENT p (#PCDATA|emphasis)*>

I know where <p> is allowed to appear, and I know what it is allowed
to contain, but I know *nothing* more about what it means -- that
information is still hard-coded in an application somewhere.

I am a big fan of DTDs and have even written a book on them, but I
don't buy the 'discipline-of-writing-a-DTD-makes-you-think' model any
more than I buy the 'discipline-of-learning-Latin-makes-you-think'
model (and I enjoy reading Latin).

Namespaces actually help the problem a bit: they still do not tell me
what an element means (and I will be stunned if the result of the XML
Schema WG's work does that either), but at least they provide a global
point of reference.  I do not know if <p> in document A and <p> in
document B are meant to have anything in common, but I do know that
(using James Clark's notation) <{http://www.megginson.com/ns/doc/}p>
in document A and <{http://www.megginson.com/ns/doc/}p> in document B
are meant to have something in common.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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