XML trade off 1 - DTD vs XML Schema

[DuCharme, Robert]

Rick Jelliffe  writes:

>The XML Schema supporters have never made any response to questions
>several people have raised over the last year questioning the
>practicality (*as a DTD replacement*) of a verbose syntax: who wants to 
>download a 100K schema for a 1K instance?

I'll take a crack at an answer and add a question.

A: I'll bet that a lot of 1K instances--maybe even the majority--will be
shipped somewhere where the schema is already known, making the schema
unnecessary to ship. <emph>For such small documents</emph>, production
applications designed to handle arbitrary DTDs on the fly won't be as common
as the systems that ship information designed specifically for those
systems. (While XML Web browsers will need to read arbitrary DTDs, they're
not relevant to this question, given the scarcity of 1K web pages out
there.) 

Q: Where do you get this figure of 100K? I thought I heard a rumor that you
were working on a DTD-to-W3C-Schema omle script as a sequel to xml2ddml.xom;
I would love to pump some DTDs through that to see some rough figures of the
percentage of bloat added.

Bob DuCharme          www.snee.com/bob           <bob@  
snee.com>  "The elements be kind to thee, and make thy
spirits all of comfort!" Anthony and Cleopatra, III ii

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