Reconsidering DTDs and validity (was RE: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-webdav-rfc2518bis-03.txt)

Are there any more opinions on the use of DTDs?  Has the consensus reversed?
I thought the consensus was clear way back when I made the change to move
from a specific list of children to the definition form of ANY (where
appropriate) plus a list of possible children in English rather than DTD.  

Originally, there was a lot of discussion that overall seemed to favour DTDs
that allowed both extensibility and validation.  FOr example:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/1999OctDec/0242.html -
Juergen Reuter
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/1998JulSep/0055.html - Jim
Amsden
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/2000OctDec/0082.html -
James Hunt
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/2001OctDec/0201.html -
Julian Reschke
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/1998JulSep/0060.html -
Lauren Wood
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/1998JulSep/0061.html   ^

Are we back to the idea of throwing out the DTDs altogether?  That would be
OK by me. Sometimes English can be more accurate than a limited formal
language.

Say, why do so many names on this list begin with 'J'?  Clearly Geoff should
spell his name Jeoff & I should change my name to Jelisa or something.

Lisa


> I agree with all of his points.  The only one I was tempted 
> to question was "Section 13: XML element definitions", where 
> he suggested going back to the old syntax for DTD's.  But 
> upon further reflection, although I believe the new more 
> flexible notation should be used when defining all new 
> elements, for compatibility with old servers, we should 
> probably maintain the element order defined by 2518, so I 
> actually agree with that point as well (:-).
> 
> Cheers,
> Geoff
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Julian Reschke [mailto:julian.reschke@gmx.de]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 7:52 AM
> To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject: RE: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-webdav-rfc2518bis-03.txt
> 
> 
...
> 
> 03-C34:
> 
> Section 13: XML element definitions
> 
> I don't like the syntax change in the DTDs. For instance, 
> activelock now is defined as:
> 
>    <!ELEMENT activelock ANY>
>    ANY value: Any number of elements, including one of each of
>    (lockscope, locktype, depth, owner, timeout, locktoken, lockroot)
> 
> It used to be:
> 
>    <!ELEMENT activelock (lockscope, locktype, depth, owner?, timeout?,
>    locktoken?) >
> 
> For consistency with RFC2518, RFC3253 and the ACL spec we 
> really should stay with the old notation.
>

Received on Saturday, 21 June 2003 19:55:56 UTC