How about over 1,000,000 XHTML Namespace URIs?

[Marc.McDonald at Design-Intelligence.com]

I took a look at the XHTML DTDs and basically wonder why there is a need for
3 of them at all or their corresponding namespaces. The major difference in
structure is a frameset element instead of a body element inside the HTML
element. There are additional attributes for color, alignment, and a target
frame. There are a few added elements. The DTDs map as follows:
	strict		No alignment, colors, framesets
	frameset	Alignment, colors, framesets
		transitional	Alignment, colors, no framesets

	An HTML processor is supposed to handle unexpected elements
gracefully, so why not have one DTD and namespace? The use of any elements
or attributes not expected by the processor need to be handled anyway. 

	Just always use the frameset DTD with the change of:
		<!ELEMENT html (head, (body | frameset))>
	so either frameset or non-frameset structure is valid.

	The single DTD should be modified to have conditionals to restrict
it to the given subset DTDs if desired for restrictive validation. So many
parameter entites are used and no one thought of using them for the
differences:
		<!ENTITY a.targeting % "target %FrameTarget; #IMPLIED">
		<!ENTITY a.align % "align %imgAlign; #IMPLIED">
		<!ENTITY a.spacing % "hspace %pixels; #IMPLIED vspace
%pixels; #IMPLIED">
	etc.

	Besides eliminating the problem, it's a lot easier to maintain one
DTD instead of three with 95% commonality.


> Marc B. McDonald
> Principal Software Scientist
> Design Intelligence, Inc.
> 1111 Third Avenue, Suite 1500
> Seattle, WA  98101
> marc.mcdonald at design-intelligence.com
> Ph: 206.343-7797
> Fax: 206.343.7750
> 
> http://www.design-intelligence.com
> 

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