Re: Verbosity of XHTML 2

Lachlan Cannon <luminosity@members.evolt.org> wrote:

> > I certainly see the value of validation but I remain unconvinced
> > whether DTD-validity should be imposed in XHTML 2, that's part of
> > the reasons why I'm playing with other alternatives to see which is
> > reasonable and least burdensome to both authors and implementors.
> 
> Why not produce a DTD with the default namespace, and tell people it's 
> perfectly legal to use others, but that their docuemnt won't be valid? 

Why stick with the DTD, when it's so apparent that it cannot describe
the language correctly?  XML Schema REC provided a non-normative DTD
for Schemas, and I could live with that approach.  People could use
it at their own risk, but I'm not tempted to requiring validation
against that DTD to user agents.

> (How about using the method used with XHTML + SVG + MathML, that is 
> having defaults and making it easy for other people to set up their own 
> by changing a few entities within the doctype declaration. It won't work 
> for mid document namespace changes, but then what will?)

Man, I wrote that DTD driver and I know how painful it is than
anybody else.  It's too tricky that sane people should never bother,
it very clearly illustrates how inappropriate DTD is for describing
a multi-namespace document type.  I said, if we are ever able to
write a DTD for XHTML 2, most probably it's even more complex than that.

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Tuesday, 13 August 2002 06:38:31 UTC