Parser compliance

[Jerome McDonough]

At 09:18 PM 11/17/99 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
>The DTD has two small but important roles in system implementation: as
>a partial set of structural validation rules and as a partial schema
>for guided authoring (it's nearly always supplemented in both cases).
>

Limiting a discussion of DTD's importance to system implementation, though,
strikes me as somewhat unfair.  Although perhaps not the case for many
commercial endeavors, DTDs provided a focus for many efforts designed
to provide a standard for document exchange.  If it weren't for DTDs, 
projects like EAD, TEI, and DDI would have had a much more difficult
time getting where they going as quickly as they did.  Granted the exact
mechanism didn't have to be DTDs, but DTDs did help a lot of people,
including me, start focusing on structure and really paying attention to
issues of document analysis in a way that I don't think would have happened
otherwise.


Jerome McDonough -- jmcdonou at library.Berkeley.EDU  |  (......)
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"Well, it looks easy enough...."                   |   \ -- /  SGNORMPF!!!
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