Versioning DTDs?

[Ken Gentle]

Hi ya'll!

In developing an e-commerce dialog (using XML, of course), we've determined
that the messages need to be versioned.  Specifically, we'll need to have
some way of versioning a DTD such that the XML parser can "figure out"
which version of the DTD to use.

As the XCatalog stuff (for PUBLIC entities) is not widely supported yet
(based on my rather naive perspective), simply mapping the PUBLIC ids to
different DTDs won't work.  Additionally, there is the "change-over
period":  what if I have messages/documents to process in my "queue" when
the publicly available DTD changes?  If the structure of the two versions
of the DTD are incompatible, I've introduced a problem...

Any ideas? References? Pointers?

Am I missing something fundamental by even considering versioning DTDs?

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