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>This isn't the first time this issue has come up. What's striking is that the >proponents of the opposing views (namespaces work with DTD's; they don't) treat >the answer as obvious and hardly worth discussion. The problem is that people are using different definitions of "work with". As noted, you can write a DTD and a namespace-aware document so that the latter is valid against the former. This is of minimal utility -- it requires that you lock in specific prefixes, and specific places where those prefixes can be defined (unless you play some ugly games with parameter entities), and it validates only the QNames -- which, in the Namespace view of the universe, are among the least interesting information. If you want proper namespace-aware validation, you'll have to switch to the XML Schema language or one of its competetors. DTDs simply will not get you there. There have been proposals to extend DTDs to handle namespaces. The usual response is to refer folks to the newer schema languages. The sole justification for DTD syntax is compatability with SGML schemas; I don't think we can retain that while extending them to be namespace-aware, and if we're going to give that up we might as well switch to instance syntax and simplify parsing.
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