Re: Documentation for DTDs (was HDML DTD)

In message <v01540b02afd331e6d5ad@[207.60.235.9]> davep@acm.org (Dave Peterson) writes:
> At 6:09 AM 6/22/97, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> 
> >IMO the additiona of useful documentation to DTDs in a formal manner would be
> >the single most valuable thing that could be done to 'sell' the DTD concept
> >to the new users of XML.  A complex DTD, with or without PEs, with no
> >machine-readable documentation is a turn-off.
> 
> Most such machine-readable "documentation" is dependent on the system doing
> the reading.  That's just what PIs in the DTD are for.  Is that what you're
> arguing for?

Does this mean that there is a standard way of documenting DTDs using PIs?
Please forgive my ignorance - (I have never seen it in the (rather few) DTDs 
I have downloaded.) 

> 
> If there's some particular form of "machine readable documentation" that is
> so universally useful that it ought to be a specific language feature, the
> SGML RG of WG8 would certainly like to know about it.

Well, I thought that dtd2html was a good start.  It uses HTML for each Element
and can also deal specifically with attributes which apply to more than one 
element.  I see no fundamental reason why this approach couldn't be bound 
into XML DTDs.  Using XML rather than HTML for the documentation would 
probably make it easier to extract machine-parsable material.  

	P.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust, domestic net connection
Virtual School of Molecular Sciences
http://www.vsms.nottingham.ac.uk/

Received on Sunday, 22 June 1997 17:31:53 UTC