RE: DTD Confusion

I agree with all of Jim's points below, and just to make sure that
there is no misunderstanding of my position, I would
vigorously object to any requirement of any kind wrt the presence
of DTD in WebDAV messages (other than the requirement that they
be optional :-).

My suggestion was just intended as a way to allow the DTD folks to 
get what they need, while clarifying that the protocol will only
be concerned with intra-message, not inter-message DTD consistency.

Cheers,
Geoff

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Whitehead [mailto:ejw@cse.ucsc.edu]
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 1:05 AM
To: ietf-dav-versioning@w3.org
Subject: RE: DTD Confusion


Well, I personally have had mixed emotions concerning the value of DTDs in
the protocol specification.  When DTDs come up, half of the time I curse
Yaron for pushing DAV into using XML in the first place.  But, then there
are times, such as when editing the ACL specification recently, where the
act of creating the DTD uncovered several errors in the XML aspects of the
specification, and DTDs seem like a good thing.
 
If someone with deep implementation experience like Hartmut Warncke feels
that appropriate use of DTDs would have saved some interoperability
problems, then it seems like the 3-5 hours to produce these DTDs would be
worthwhile (it didn't take that long to produce the ACL spec. one, even with
fixing the errors I found).
 
As for the per-method DTD, this seems like a good idea, one worth exploring
in the revision of RFC 2518.
 
Of course, this is all subject to the caveat that the WebDAV XML rules not
be interfered with (i.e., sibling ordering is not guaranteed, the XML
namespace append rules, and the unknown element ignore rule).  I'm also not
in favor of sending the URL of the DTD in every message -- what a waste of
bandwidth, since clients and servers won't be doing dynamic validation.

- Jim

Received on Friday, 9 February 2001 06:49:05 UTC