RE: DTD Confusion

I agree with all of Jim's points below.

My only thought was that if the DTD advocates were comfortable with
this statement, that I could add a statement in the notation
convention section that the document specifies the DTD for each type of
message, and that the definition of an element in the DTD of one
type of message can in general differ from the DTD for that element in
another
type of message.  For example, the DAV:set element in PROPFIND and the
LABEL method.

Cheers,
Geoff 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Amsden [mailto:jamsden@us.ibm.com]

... this is really a WebDAV issue too, so the WebDAV working group should
get involved. If they aren't interested in providing DTDs, then there
probably isn't much point in Delta-V doing providing a partial set. Also
note that having the DTDs should never require clients or servers to use
them. They won't help formalize the extensions either. Personally I'm more
interested in getting the semantics understood and formalized. DTDs can't do
this, they only do structure. A good, complete object model, including
behavior, state models, and/or interaction diatrams (or collaboration graphs
depending on your preference) would be much more useful. 




"Geoffrey M. Clemm" <geoffrey.clemm@rational.com> 

A compromise suggestion for those interested in DTD's:

Each of the WebDAV messages are a separate XML document.
If you design a separate DTD for each WebDAV message type
(i.e. one for a PROPFIND request, one for a PROPFIND response,
one for a CHECKIN request, etc.), I believe you will find
that all the anomalies disappear.  In addition,
I believe this will produce a set of much more manageable,
extensible DTD's than would be provided by trying to
amass all WebDAV DTD information into one massive DTD.

Cheers,
Geoff

Received on Friday, 9 February 2001 06:49:01 UTC