- From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr>
- Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 01:13:16 +0200
- To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Cc: www-tag <www-tag@w3.org>
Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote: > Rich Salz wrote: >> DTD's are ignorant of namespaces. This means that you cannot write a >> normative DTD for a namespace > > Actually you can do quite a bit better than that. It's possible to use > parameter entity references such that the same DTD can be used for > multiple prefixes and the default namespace. The most any instance > document needs to do is override two parameter entity declarations. Yes, it's better than nothing (the SVG 1.1 DTD also does that) but it's still not a general (and even less practical) way of validating namespaced documents. And Rich's point remains that you cannot write a normative DTD for a namespaced language. That's an issue that crops up regularly in document-based communities where people have tried to learn from HTML's errors and recommend validation against a DTD. Unfortunately, since it produces false-negatives, you then end up with content producers wondering why their content doesn't validate when according to every knowledge of the spec they can muster it is perfectly fine. -- Robin Berjon Research Scientist Expway, http://expway.com/
Received on Sunday, 3 April 2005 23:13:36 UTC