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On 11/15/2013 04:13 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote: Thank you! I couldn't have explained that perspective myself. From my (programmer's) perspective, the idea that a document is not complete in itself without some external resources to interpret it turns out to be a practical disadvantage. I understand there are historical reasons for the DTD dependence. I was just pointing out that is religion of a different sort than the programmer's dogma that Pete and Simon were alluding (type purity and rigidity of design, I think).* Michael Sokolov wrote:There's OCD stuff in the XML world too, and it was there right from the start, it just has a different flavor: DTD. The whole "DOCTYPE must be conveyed with the document" religion created the concept of a document that isn't complete without being processed by its accompanying DTD. The result is a programmer's nightmare, but makes sense to a certain kind of document purist.DTDs are necessary to process documents that depend on them e.g. because they use named entity references as re-usable macros, or in case of SGML to permit various forms of shorthand syntax like implied elements. Then they made processing DTDs optional and people did not bother to develop and deploy infrastructure needed to work with them. -Mike
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