Re: DTD Confusion

I'll go you one better. Not only would I vigorously object, I simply won't
add a requirement for them to the code I write :-)

DTDs are nice from a descriptive standpoint, but they can't do anything
about the semantics. And since you're processing for semantics, the rules
emboded in a DTD just naturally come along for the ride. There is little
incremental benefit in this scenario.

Cheers,
-g

On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 06:57:15AM -0500, Clemm, Geoff wrote:
> I agree with all of Jim's points below, and just to make sure that
> there is no misunderstanding of my position, I would
> vigorously object to any requirement of any kind wrt the presence
> of DTD in WebDAV messages (other than the requirement that they
> be optional :-).
> 
> My suggestion was just intended as a way to allow the DTD folks to 
> get what they need, while clarifying that the protocol will only
> be concerned with intra-message, not inter-message DTD consistency.
> 
> Cheers,
> Geoff
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Whitehead [mailto:ejw@cse.ucsc.edu]
> Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 1:05 AM
> To: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org
> Subject: RE: DTD Confusion
> 
> 
> Well, I personally have had mixed emotions concerning the value of DTDs in
> the protocol specification.  When DTDs come up, half of the time I curse
> Yaron for pushing DAV into using XML in the first place.  But, then there
> are times, such as when editing the ACL specification recently, where the
> act of creating the DTD uncovered several errors in the XML aspects of the
> specification, and DTDs seem like a good thing.
>  
> If someone with deep implementation experience like Hartmut Warncke feels
> that appropriate use of DTDs would have saved some interoperability
> problems, then it seems like the 3-5 hours to produce these DTDs would be
> worthwhile (it didn't take that long to produce the ACL spec. one, even with
> fixing the errors I found).
>  
> As for the per-method DTD, this seems like a good idea, one worth exploring
> in the revision of RFC 2518.
>  
> Of course, this is all subject to the caveat that the WebDAV XML rules not
> be interfered with (i.e., sibling ordering is not guaranteed, the XML
> namespace append rules, and the unknown element ignore rule).  I'm also not
> in favor of sending the URL of the DTD in every message -- what a waste of
> bandwidth, since clients and servers won't be doing dynamic validation.
> 
> - Jim

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

Received on Friday, 9 February 2001 07:41:34 UTC