FW: Namespaces and DTDs

Didier PH Martin martind at netfolder.com
Sat Mar 13 04:33:03 GMT 1999


Hi Marc

<YourComment>
It's quite true that you can have XML that does not require validation 
and that this is commonly done. An exception is the defaulting of the 
value of any attributes of elements in a DTD, which has been mentioned 
in another reply.

You can construct a DOM without validation, but the next step ends up 
being a procedural implementation of picking apart the DOM document 
tree to construct whatever structure the application using DOM 
requires to interpret the document.

I can parse:
  <book title="tale of 2 cities">
    <chapter>
      <para>..<para>
    </chapter>
    <chapter>
        ...
    </chapter>
      ...
  </book>
without a DTD.

But if my application needs to get the information out of the DOM I 
need to write code to:
  Create a representation for Book consisting of a title and chapters 
and get book from DOM
  Create a representation for each Chapter and get Chapters from DOM
  Create a representation for each paragraph in a chapter and get 
paragraphs from DOM.
Part of this is what is expressed in the DTD. Wouldn't it be better if 
a system were created that used the DTD on the receiving end to create 
the application representation instead of serializing it back into 
elements and constructing a new tree?
</YourComment>

<Reply>
a) what do mean by " a representation" is it a rendition object? 
</Reply>

Regards
Didier PH Martin
mailto:martind at netfolder.com
http://www.netfolder.com 

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