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On Wed, 17 Nov 1999, Steven R. Newcomb wrote: > I have often wondered where this myth arose that DTDs are somewhere > between evil and useless. It's baffling that this myth arises when > there's nothing better than, or even as good as DTDs. It seems to me that the problem lies in what exactly DTDs are used /for/. Basically, DTDs are used for checking the structure of a document. While this is doubtless important, it seems to me to be curious that what is essentially an error-checking mechanism is the first thing that many people learn about XML. This in turn is because the important bit of XML - viz designing hierarchical structures - becomes conflated in many people's minds with the syntax you use to error-check your structures. This is particularly worrying because in many cases the error-handling will be best dealt with by something familiar with the /semantics/ of the structure (i.e. a specific XML application) rather than by an XML parser. -- Richard Lanyon (Software Engineer) | "The medium is the message" XML Script development, | - Marshall McLuhan DecisionSoft Ltd. | xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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