- From: Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net>
- Date: Tue, 7 Oct 1997 07:48:53 -0700
- To: ejw@ics.uci.edu, tallen@sonic.net, yarong@microsoft.com
- Cc: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
Yaron Goland writes:
| DTDs are NOT necessary for XML and in fact are seen as being deprecated
| by many parts of the XML community. Furthermore the DTD syntax is not
| well known amongst the HTTP community, of which DAV is a member, while
| BNF is.
|
| Given that providing a DTD is not necessity for XML and that we will
| still have to provide our current syntax I propose that we add DTDs, as
| an appendix, to the final draft. Until we reach that final draft, there
| is little point in having to maintain two sets of definitions.
XML documents may be either well formed (the tags are correctly nested)
or valid. If valid, there must be a DTD that describes the ways in
which they may be nested (among other things). I can't think of
anyone in "the XML community" experienced in the processing of SGML/XML
documents who deprecates DTDs.
If WEBDAV is using XML, it's as much a part of "the XML community"
as "the HTTP community".
Given that a DTD is necessary for validating an XML document,
and that your XML isn't that complicated, it would be far clearer
to present what is now given as prose in the form of a DTD, and it
would also allow early implementors to validate their attempts
to implement the WEBDAV spec. As it stands now, there is no
machine-readable syntax in the spec, yet it could be provided. That's
a serious fault.
(By "qualified GIs" I meant element type names that use the colon
syntax to indicate derivation of an element from another DTD/schema/
name space, as "D:PropertyUpdate.)
Regards,
Terry Allen Electronic Publishing Consultant tallen[at]sonic.net
http://www.sonic.net/~tallen/
Davenport and DocBook: http://www.ora.com/davenport/index.html
at CNgroup: terry.allen[at]cngroup.com
Received on Tuesday, 7 October 1997 10:49:17 UTC