Re: "validate against"???

[ Are messages to the www-html-editor list automatically mirrored to
  www-html list?  I nearly misdirected this followup. ]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Dan Connolly wrote:

> regarding:
> 
> "2.1. Document Conformance
> [...]
>    1.It must validate against the DTD found in Appendix B.
> 
> What do you mean by "validate against"? 

I believe "against" == "with respect to".

> Per XML 1.0, 'valid' is descriptive of XML documents, not a
> relationship between documents and DTDs. c.f.  
> http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210#dt-valid

Indeed.  Since document type declarations are an optional feature, the
substantive intent is that *if* a DTD is present (via the document
type declaration) then it must comprise the contents of Appendix B. 

Ordinarily, this doesn't preclude other validation mechanisms which
still use declaration subsets (what 'DTD's really are as objects of
reference).

> You could say:
> 
> 	It must be a valid XML 1.0 document, and its document type
> 	declaration must be:
> 
> 	<!DOCTYPE html SYSTEM
> 
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-xhtml-basic-20000210/xhtml-basic10-model-1.mod">

Yes, it could say that.  Expaining what saying something like that
means still brings up the notion of a dclaration subset, and how it
gets included as a syntactic component of the document.

If you want just the handwaving and voodoo (all the more to make a
laughing stock out of SGML) why not call for Appendix B to be removed
altogether?


Arjun

Received on Friday, 11 February 2000 05:29:06 UTC