Re: RS/RE, again (sorry)

>>We seem to be confusing parsing XML, and parsing the grammar defined
>>by the DTD is you ask me...
>
>But one of the important points about SGML (of which XML is a subset) is a
>contract between the parser and the application: "I will not hand you data
>which does not conform to the DTD." 

Really? I've never seen it explicitly stated that this is true. Given
that SGML is largely silent about error-handling, and grey on a lot of
other fronts, it seems like this would be difficult to achieve at
best.

>This is *central*. Without it, we can seldom do intelligent things
>with documents.

I'll confess that I quite often do not use a DTD at all during
document creation, simply because I find that in my writing,
DTD's are a nuisance. I generally *do* go back and validate my
documents, however, and in later processing, ignore it again.

>Your solution would leave it up entirely to applications, which will (IMO)
>almost inevitably lead to incompatibility.

Depends. At least all the applications will know *exactly* what
they'll be handed.