RE: TAG Comments on XHTML 2.0 and HLink

Hi Robin,

Robin said:
Except you've missed the part about not relying on DTD or Schema to 
default the missing attributes, which I believe is a sane requirement.

The SVG DTD[1] shows much defaulting, which is a rather unpleasant 
approach to language design (but the fault is not on the SVG side). For 
one it burdens DOMs uselessly.

   [1]http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/svgdtd.html#DTD.1.14

Didier replies:
So what? Let's just recognize how browsers, and in particular the
principal one(Microsoft Explorer) are working:
a) In general they do not rely on a DTD to interpret what each element
means. They just internally map a visual object or visual construct to
an HTML element. Even more, for any HTML update such as XHTML.
b) Actually, DTDs are mostly used to validate documents or to be used as
a template for editors(Mainly for element insertion).
c) Just to take an other example: the SVG viewer from adobe. It doesn't
require any DTD references to interpret an SVG document.

So, in current practices, the DTDs are used for validation or in XML
authoring tools. We can say that based on the praxis, a DTD is
sufficient but not necessary for rendition.

your argument float only if it is impossible to validate the document or
that an XML authoring tool cannot know what element/attribute to insert
in a specific place holder. Thus, for validation a DTD is sufficient and
necessary, for document rendition it is not necessary but it is
sufficient. 

Cheers
Didier PH Martin

Received on Thursday, 26 September 2002 15:30:09 UTC