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Re: Make DTDs optional?

From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 16:09:12 -0400
Message-Id: <1.5.4.32.19960930200912.00d63a1c@csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 01:54 AM 10/1/96 +1000, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>Is this really more what XML should be about: a markup language for
>presenting documents in the form required by the application?  (Which
>would correspond to the normalised form of an SGML document when parsed
>against archetectural forms that model the XML application.) In other
>words, a  temporary/application/closed-system format rather than a 
>archiving/modelling/manipulation/open-system format like SGML.  

If so, we should think hard about the internationalization issues. As Gavin
pointed out, it may be unnecessarily heavy handed of us to require a Java
applet to convert to UCS-2 (or worse, UTF-8) in order to pass a few bytes of
data to a Visual Basic script (which will process it as ASCII, reconvert it
back and pass it on to a database engine).

Perhaps we should err on the side of flexibility in this
internationalization issue.

 Paul Prescod
Received on Monday, 30 September 1996 16:14:20 EDT

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