Well-formed vs. valid

[Jeffrey E. Sussna]

In spit of my recent editorial about markup vs. type systems, I agree with many of the "opposing" statements that have been made. In particular, I agree with the statement about XML 1.0 as a stable base. The base XML spec is really the only stable part of the family at this point, and we should not in fact f*ck with it.

One thing disturbs me, however. Much talk seems to be made about documents or document fragments being useful because they are well-formed. I don't want something well-formed, I want something "valid". Whether validity is determined by reference to a DTD or to a schema of some other kind, I need more than just the lowest-level syntactic conformance to the XML spec. I need to be able to determine that the XML in question conforms to the syntactic and semantic constraints imposed by my application. Furthermore, I don't want to have to rely on implicit knowledge contained within a proprietary parser in order to do so. 

Jeff

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Kuantech, Inc.                            http://www.kuantech.com
Jeffrey E. Sussna, Principal                     jes at kuantech.com

Distributed Content Architectures for Dynamic Online Applications
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