Re: XHTML-RDFa test cases for Validator Re: XHTML-RDFa draft made public

Ben Adida wrote:
> I'm confused: this requires re-declaring all the XML namespaces in the
> DTD declaration? That doesn't seem like a viable direction for
> validating pages in the wild.
>   
Well - there are other ways to do it. I was just demonstrating that it 
would work.  I didn't mean to imply it was a good idea.  You and some 
others seemed to feel it was impossible.
> Is this a DTD vs. XML Schema validation issue?
>   
Yes.  Sort of anyway.  The w3c validator, and indeed MOST validators out 
there, rely upon the sgmls/nsgmls/onsgmls tool that is now part of 
OpenSP.  This tool is DTD based, and has no provision I know of for 
permitting random attributes to just show up.  We addressed this in 
XHTML M12N many years ago by providing this hook.  You could achieve the 
same thing by teaching the validator abouts lots of well know namespaces 
and prefixes...  and then having it automagically shoehorn them into the 
internal subset before processing.  You could also have the validator 
pre-scan the document, extract the namespace declarations, and do the 
same thing.

It has not really been an issue to date, but those are a couple of 
pretty straightforward solutions that would work more or less 
immediately with XHTML Family markup languages.  I would be happy to 
implement either one if anyone is interested in letting me.


-- 
Shane P. McCarron                          Phone: +1 763 786-8160 x120
Managing Director                            Fax: +1 763 786-8180
ApTest Minnesota                            Inet: shane@aptest.com

Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2007 19:34:04 UTC