Re: XHTML Comments

Excellent point re why HTML 4.0 had one of its three DTDs!
I'd not had occasion to think about that one before.

Leveraging that observation makes it possible to get rid of
one of the XHTML DTDs even without those specific changes that
I was suggesting in the point you quoted.  (It turns out that
only one PE would be needed to toggle all of the "deprecated"
functionality off or on in a single DTD system.)

This also, as you mentioned, lends further strength to the
"too many namespaces" argument.  Even those who want to see
more than one namespace (for some cryptic reason) don't need
to have more than two.  One down, one to go ... :-)

- Dave


Nir Dagan wrote:
> 
> I would like to support some of the arguments of David Brownell,
> in particular the issue of multiple DTDs.
> 
> As far as I understand the ONLY REASON why there are separate
> transitional and frameset DTDs in HTML4.0 is the one mentioned in
> a comment in the loose DTD:
> 
> <!--
>   The content model for HTML documents depends on whether the HEAD is
>   followed by a FRAMESET or BODY element. The widespread omission of
>   the BODY start tag makes it impractical to define the content model
>   without the use of a marked section.
> -->
> from http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/loosedtd.html
> 
> If I understand the comment correctly it means that if
> the content model of the html element was declared as
> <!ELEMENT HTML O O (HEAD,(BODY|FRAMESET))>
> ommiting the start tag of the BODY in normal (non-frameset)
> documents would be considered as an error by an SGML parser,
> even if the start tag of BODY is declared as optional.
> 
> Since in XHTML all start tags are required, the only reason for
> two DTDs goes away.
> 
> It seems reasonable that if the DTDs of transitional
> and frameset are merged, they cannot have two names
> spaces.
> 
> Regards,
> Nir Dagan.
> 
> At 01:40 PM 9/14/99 -0400, David Brownell wrote:
> >Greetings,
> >
> >The XHTML draft (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/) doesn't give an address to
> >use for feedback, so I'll send these to the www-html list instead.
> >
> ...
> >- THIRD, looking at the DTDs I confess I'm puzzled why they didn't get
> >  written as one DTD using two parameter entities to conditionally
> >  include declarations for the two categories of non-"strict" names.
> >
> >  Things would be a lot clearer if the DTD actually reflected its logical
> >  structure in that way -- or at least commented why it wasn't done.
> >  (I know there's separate work on modularization, but one can provide
> >  better DTDs without defining an approach to fine-grained modules.)
> ...
> >- Dave
> >
> ===================================
> Nir Dagan
> Assistant Professor of Economics
> Brown University
> Providence, RI
> USA
> 
> http://www.nirdagan.com
> mailto:nir@nirdagan.com
> tel:+1-401-863-2145

Received on Wednesday, 15 September 1999 12:39:59 UTC