Re: Reviewing Last Call RDFa

> > 4.1   "There SHOULD be a DOCTYPE declaration in the document prior to
> > the root element."  DTDs are a an obsolete technology. Suggest the spec
> > not refer to them in any way.
>
>
> We would be happy to do so.... if only there was a W3C REC (and a
> validator.w3.org implementation) for validating XHTML1.1 using XML
> schema. Sadly, there isn't, and since we get a lot of "this won't
> validate!" criticism, we had to go with DOCTYPE and DTDs.


Under 'Conformance' in XHTML 1.1 I found:
[[
The root element MAY also contain an schemaLocation attribute as defined in
the [XMLSCHEMA] <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/references.html#ref_XMLSCHEMA>
. The schema location for XHTML is defined to be "
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SCHEMA/xhtml11.xsd".

There MUST be a DOCTYPE declaration in the document prior to the root
element. If present, the public identifier included in the DOCTYPE
declaration MUST reference the DTD found in Appendix
C<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/xhtml11_dtd.html#a_xhtml11_dtd>using
its public identifier. The
system identifier MAY be modified appropriately.
 ]]
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/conformance.html#s_conform

So it looks there's no avoiding the DOCTYPE, though there may be a route
around the DTD while still allowing validation.

Is the association between the doc and the schema essential - not enough in
media type & namespace etc to adequately identify the document type?
(Reason I ask is my money would be on Relax NG being able to provide neater
validation of HTML+RDFa than xsd, but I don't believe there's any in-doc way
of making the association).

Cheers,
Danny.
-- 
http://dannyayers.com
~
http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/this_weeks_semantic_web/