Re: Ending DTD proliferation at the W3C

I support this for the reasons stated.

Has schema-language deprecation ever been done before at the W3C? Was there
a sunset on SGML?


On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 7:22 PM, Michael[tm] Smith <mike@w3.org> wrote:

> In response to a suggestion[*] from Dan Appelquist on twitter, I'd like to
> ask that the TAG consider taking a position against further publication of
> DTDs in W3C TR space by any W3C working group.
>
>   [*] https://twitter.com/torgo/status/422746987650220032
>
> Specifically, I'd like for there to be a document from the TAG somewhere
> stating that:
>
>   - Working groups should not include DTDs or portions from DTDs in any
>     form, even non-normatively, within any specifications they wish to
>     publish as Working Drafts or Notes in TR space.
>
>   - Working groups should also not publish DTDs separate from
> specifications
>     in TR space, including not for the purpose of referencing the DTDs
>     within a specification nor for any other purpose; so for example, no
>     further DTDs should be made available in TR space similar to the way in
>     which http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd is made available there.
>
>   - No current W3C draft specifications that contain or reference DTDs
>     should be allowed to transition to Candidate Recommendation, Proposed
>     Recommendation, or Recommendation.
>
> The rationale for stopping publication of DTDs in TR space is that:
>
>   - DTDs published in TR space risk being considered by the community to be
>     complete normative expressions of the document-conformance constraints
>     for a specification, even if they are labeled as non-normative.
>
>   - DTDs as a formalism lack the power to express many document-conformance
>     constraints that can be stated in the prose of a specification. The
>     community should always first be reading the prose of the
> specifications
>     themselves in order to understand the conformance constraints the
>     specification states -- rather than relying on any accompanying DTD.
>
>   - To the degree that it's useful for the W3C to publish schema formalisms
>     at all, DTDs as a schema formalism have been obsoleted for many years
>     now by Relax NG and W3C XML Schema (which even themselves are unable to
>     express many conformance constraints that can be stated in the prose of
>     a specification, but at least come closer than DTDs).
>
> --
> Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike
>
>