Re: Verbosity of XHTML 2

Masayasu Ishikawa wrote:

>>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.

Well yes, that's more or less what I was getting at. Out of interest 
does XHTML 1.x require validation? If so, then current browsers don't 
even care (apart from Moz with the right doctype as far as I'm aware), 
and if not why the change?

You could produce a schema of course, and then produce a non-normative 
DTD that expresses everything the same but in terms of default 
namespaces. I think it's definitely a good idea to at least publish this 
non normative DTd however, because they're a hell of a lot easier to 
read a quick fragment and see how something works (cf the XLinks spec).

> 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.

Well, I'd trust your word on it then (Not that I don't love the way that 
thing works.. I'm using it myself. Very nice). It makes me wonder... 
should the W3C rewrite the XML DTD wrt namespaces to make it easier to 
do this stuff? Once again, I personally think DTDs are much more 
readable & intuitive.

In any case, I think that a non normative DTD with default namespaces is 
definitely a must have appendix. The actual validation should of course 
be written in schema if that's more appropriate and easier. After all 
that gives the HTML Working group more time to work on other aspects of 
the spec, which can only be a good thing, ne?

-- 
Lach
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Web: http://illuminosity.net/
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Received on Tuesday, 13 August 2002 07:00:30 UTC