XML complexity, namespaces (was WG)

[James Robertson]

At 23:53 19/03/1999 , David Megginson wrote:

  | Almost correct.  One expensive disadvantage of SGML (until WebSGML) is
  | that it requires full DTD conformance at every stage of production; as
  | a result, if your production chain consists of ten physical steps,
  | writing out SGML at each stage, you *must* have DTDs for all of the
  | intermediate steps.  This one constraint can add $100K or more to a
  | large enterprise SGML project, since DTD writers are expensive to hire
  | (and a single, configured DTD becomes heavily obfuscated so that it
  | can almost never be maintained in-house).

I'd like to take this point up.

Having done a transformation with 12 steps in the chain,
I would disagree that the DTD becomes a big problem.

If you're using a tool like Omnimark, you can choose
to view the document as SGML or text. In general, a
lot of the steps use the latter, with some simple
find-and-replace regexps.

So in practice, we just ended up with about 5 DTDs
that were very close to each other.

Not a lot of work.

And it did ensure that all was correct at
each stage, catching errors in a most satisfying
way.

Cheers,

James

-------------------------
James Robertson
Step Two Designs Pty Ltd
SGML, XML & HTML Consultancy
http://www.steptwo.com.au/
jamesr at steptwo.com.au

"Beyond the Idea"
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