Another look at namespaces

[James Tauber]

> This distinction, that the Document Type Definition is not the same as the
markup declarations, is as old as
> SGML.

SGML makes the distinction and I think it is a good one but I don't think
XML does. In XML a DTD is the (formal)grammar defined by the markup
declarations and no more.

In SGML, Document Type Definition = names + syntax + semantics
In XML, Document Type Definition = names + syntax

(NOTE: I'm separating names and syntax to emphasis the distinction between a
choice of name for an element type and a choice of syntactic contraint.
Arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and all that)

Perhaps we need a word for names + syntax + semantics in XML.

Some people use "XML vocabulary" for this and others use "XML vocabulary" to
mean a set of element and attribute names along with their semantics (ie
little or no syntax).

Whether one views:

    vocabulary = names + semantics
or
    vocabulary = names + syntax + semantics

possible determines their standing on the number of namespaces XHTML 1.0
should have.

James



xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)