- From: David G. Durand <dgd@cs.bu.edu>
- Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 14:37:41 -0500
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
- Cc: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 2:16 PM -0500 6/20/97, Eve L. Maler wrote: >Having parameter entities for just (1) complete declarations (modules), (2) >complete model groups (nearly equivalent to GI name groups), and (3) >keywords for marked sections (switches) greatly impoverishes the set of >useful PEs. You don't have PEs for: > >4 Individual attribute specifications (common attributes) >5 Sets of elements with which you build up repeatable-OR content models > ("classes" and "mixtures" in Jeanne's and my methodology) >6 Other content model subgroups >7 Other things that are less needful, but still useful > >If I can't have at least 1 through 5, I can't get away with doing >high-quality, complex production DTDs. If it's just too complicated to >spec and build the capability for 4 and 5, which I'm willing to believe for >V1.0, is it that useful to have 1 through 3? I'm not sure. > > Eve Eve is correct, this proposal preserves compatibility at the expense of utility. PEs are the universal bandaid for the generalizations that DTDs do not let us express: commonalities of content model, attributes, context of ocurrences, element classes and so forth. If XML is to be useful for content on its own, we need these generalizations in our DTDs. We faced this once and made the right decision in terms of power. We should not back off now. We already have HTML, we need something more than another delivery-only format. -- David -- David _________________________________________ David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu \ david@dynamicDiagrams.com Boston University Computer Science \ Sr. Analyst http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ \ Dynamic Diagrams --------------------------------------------\ http://dynamicDiagrams.com/ MAPA: mapping for the WWW \__________________________
Received on Monday, 23 June 1997 14:40:23 UTC