Re: Clark's commentary

At 01:59 PM 07/01/02 -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
>/ Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> was heard to say:
>| James also specifically suggested simply leaving all of the DTD
>| machinery.  The degree to which this would simplify the specification
>| work is almost beyond belief.  I think I could sit down and write
>| an XML 2.0 draft (1.0 - DTDs + namespaces + infoset) in about 3
>| days elapsed.  -Tim
>
>I think it's too early to do that. We don't have good replacements for
>entity declarations yet (IMHO) so we need to keep some DTD
>declarations around.

James argues, and I agree based on the lessons of recent
years, that the benefit of entities is exceeded by their cost.  
And just because XML 2.0 wouldn't specify DTDs, they wouldn't 
go away.  It would still allow a <!DOCTYPE> declaration which 
would still point to a 1.0 DTD.  DTD validation would remain 
defined by XML 1.0, but could be used against XML 2.0 docs.  
No internal subset though!

The only loss that I think would be rally painful would be
the ability to give names to character entities instead of 
saying &#xbabe;.  The math people would be penalized.  But
the simplicity gain would be immense.

>If I was working on it, I think I'd try to restructure the spec so
>that "DTD validation" was a black box with respect to the rest of the
>spec. 

2.0 as I proposed it would achieve this.  It would be a clean
platform that you could layer different types of validation on.
This is a painfully self-evident necessity given that DTDs show
no sign of dying and W3C XML Schema clearly will not have the
next-gen schema language platform to itself.

Received on Monday, 7 January 2002 16:34:53 UTC