Compound Documents - necessary for success?

[Roger L. Costello]

Marcus Carr wrote:

>Also, what would prevent someone from putting together a compound document
>constructed entirely of valid fragments? 

Yes, this is exactly what is desired!  

>To the naked eye it would look like an
>invalid document, but the fact that the fragments themselves were valid
and
>existed in a location that allowed them would mean that the document was
parsable
>without error. I'm not suggesting this would be a common way of producing
>documents, but nor do I think it's a good idea that you could conceivably
create
>a class of documents between well-formed and valid.

Is it not enough to verify that the fragments are valid and that the
document as a whole is well-formed?

>
>Along similar lines, how would I include, say, two paragraphs of a judge's
>speech? Does a compound document imply a single doctype element? Would I
have to
>wrap the two paragraphs in some artificial element just to make it a
complete
>document? 

I would like to assert that an XML parser *should* be able to validate each
document fragment against their respective DTDs.  Perhaps all the DTDs that
are referenced by the fragments should be listed in multiple DOCTYPEs at
the top of the document?

/Roger


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