Re: D.1 Distinguish partial and full DTDs?

At 05:23 PM 10/29/96 CST, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>It seems to me this means we need to know whether something is in
>fact a partial DTD, or is (intended to be) a full DTD.  (I am using
>'DTD' here in the sense of 'explicit markup declarations', not in
>the larger sense prescribed by 8879).  Something intended to be a
>full DTD is in theory suitable for validation; something intended
>only to be a partial DTD (e.g. to provide declarations of external
>entities) is not suitable as the basis for validation.

On the other hand, we could get right down to business and describe
an XML document as claiming to be in a ready-to-validate state or 
not.  The full/partial business makes me uncomfortable because the ends 
are just degenerate cases of the middle, but stating that you think
something is ready to be validated is a useful piece of information.

>...
>So, I think the answer to the original question is, Yes, there
>should be an XML parameter entity to indicate whether the DTD
>given is a full DTD (as for SGML) or a partial DTD not intended
>to make the document valid (probably, in practice, intended only
>to make it well-formed).

(PI, not parment, right?)  People who are making ad hoc document
structures will not want to add a PI saying that the structures are
ad hoc.  It would make more sense to require documents that are 
"complete" to have a PI saying so, since saying so would buy more
useful processing -- namely, validation by recipients.  And since
much document exchange (I'm guessing) won't be for the purpose of 
validation by recipients, the PI can be left off a lot of the time.

        Eve

Received on Wednesday, 30 October 1996 09:12:32 UTC