Re: XML and required DTDs

On Tue, 17 Sep 96 03:51:27 BST, "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> wrote:

>Charles writes:
>
>>  
>>  On Mon, 16 Sep 1996 16:52:44 -0400, "Steven J. DeRose" <sjd@ebt.com> wrote:
>>  
>>  >The only things blocking you from parsing one-entity minimal SGML document
>>  >without a DTD are:
>>  >
>>  >   a) Declared content (CDATA/RCDATA/EMPTY elements)
>>  >   b) The RE-ignoring rules.
>>  >
>>
>>  Exactly! Just eliminate declared content and mixed content and
>>  you've solved the problem. We don't need those constructs for XML,
>>  they are just forms of markup minimization parading under other
>>  names.
>
>That analysis is correct, but it would in my view none-the-less be a
>mistake to go down that road.  It would grandfather out a huge
>percentage of existing documents.
Not at all. See my later posting on that point. 

>and require huge amounts of
>obfuscatory markup, e.g.
>
><p><vc>The</vc><ship>Gretel</ship><vc>lost to</vc><ship>Constitution
></ship><vc>in</vc><date>1966</date><vc>.</vc></p>
>
>[vc for 'vanilla content']
>
This markup is not obfuscatory, just verbose. My understanding is that for XML,
verbosity is preferable to complexity.

>Or are you assuming we are allowing tag minimisation after all?  I
>thought it was out the door . . .
I think tag omission is at the door because it requires access to the DTD. On
the other hand, NET is trivial to parse without a DTD and would eliminate about
50% of the added markup.
--
Charles F. Goldfarb * Information Management Consulting * +1(408)867-5553
           13075 Paramount Drive * Saratoga CA 95070 * USA
  International Standards Editor * ISO 8879 SGML * ISO/IEC 10744 HyTime
 Prentice-Hall Series Editor * CFG Series on Open Information Management
--

Received on Tuesday, 17 September 1996 05:44:58 UTC