Re: [dita] proposal on "vocabulary" terminology

[Michael Priestley <mpriestl@ca.ibm.com>]

Eliot wrote:

>"document type" is certainly the most
accurate if you take it to mean 
>"abstract document type" (that is, a set of types distinct
from any 
>implementation expression of them) but I think that most people don't
>make that distinction, especially people like many of us with deep
SGML 
>brain damage, where there was no obvious need to distinquish between
the 
>abstract document type and its syntactic expression.

I don't understand. Does "document type"
imply a particular syntactic expression? Its use in the XHTML specification
certainly implies that it can be used for either schemas or DTDs, in exactly
the manner we want. 

>That's one reason I prefer "vocabulary"--it's completely
(and in the 
>namespace spec, explicitly) divorced from any particular syntactic
or 
>formal definition or expression of the vocabulary.

I'm not convinced that "document type" is
any more wedded to syntactic expression, and it has the advantage of already
meaning exactly what we want it to mean.

Basically, you'll need to explain to me why the XHTML
spec is wrong in its usage. And this is one place where I'm probably a
descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist: that is, if the major modularization
initiative on the Web already uses a particular set of terms, then we should
be following that existing usage rather than inventing our own.

Michael Priestley
mpriestl@ca.ibm.com
Dept PRG IBM Canada  phone: 416-915-8262
Toronto Information Development