[dsdl-comment] Re: [xml-dev] Come On, DTD, Come On! Thoughts on DSDL Part 9

K. Ari Krupnikov scripsit:

> Must be my lack of SGML experience. Can you elaborate on this one?

It's just nice to be able to write:

<!ELEMENT h1|h2|h3|h4|h5|h6 (%flow.model;)>

instead of six different element declarations.

> > General issue: Should there be some way to indicate candidate roots?
> > In existing DTDs, any element can be a root.
>
> On a tangent, I'd like to point out that the name of the root element
> in the doctypedecl (production 28 in XML, "<!DOCTYPE foo...") is only
> required for SGML compatibility and is superfluous in XML where tags
> may not be omitted and the first encountered element is unambiguously
> the root. If the proposal will break SGML compatibility anyway (the
> snipped text suggests it will), it might as well drop this unnecessary
> requirement and its associated validity constraint.

Indeed. But note that I am *not* proposing a revision of XML DTDs,
but rather the creation of a new schema language to be a superset of
XML DTDs. Schemas of this kind cannot be referenced by DOCTYPE
declarations, because the result would be not well-formed. Instead,
they must be specified to the external validation program.

This is purely my own idea and may not be the way that the committee
is going. Indeed, they are in a use-case/requirement collecting phase
and not yet doing syntax.

-- 
John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_
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