XML complexity, namespaces (was WG)

[roddey at us.ibm.com]

>> The answer, obviously, is to shed any pretense of DTDs being the basic
>> XML schema mechanism.
>
>For declaring multi-namespace documents, yes. They still have at least
>an interim role in validating single namespace documents and in defining
>the building blocks from which a multi-namespace schema can be
>constructed.

And, I think that in the glorious "Schema Age" to come, it might be nice to
be able to validate instances of your schema itself using a DTD? Since so
much will depend upon the correctness of the schema built, having it be
known correct will be nice.

I figure that, in the end, there will be tools that let people build their
own schemas and then documents that deal with them. So having a cheap and
easy way to validate the schema will be nice. But, of course, if the schema
itself uses namespaces then a DTD won't be useful for validating instances
of it either  (in which case I guess you incestuously validate it with a
description of itself in itself.)

And of course there is the ever looming issue of entities, the separation
of content and structural description. I'd kind of hate personally for DTDs
(and its separate syntax) to have to hang around just to deal with this
issue. If we have to keep DTDs for those reasons, I'd prefer to fix DTDs so
that at least they could be used for simpler namespace based validation.
Otherwise, I'd argue for throwing them out and coming up with a way to deal
with entities within a single, consistent syntax.

Then again, I'm just a guy :-)



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