Re: Ruminations on the future of DocBook

[Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com>]

Norman Walsh wrote:

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> / Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com> was heard to say:
> | I mean that no feature of DocBook should rely on any feature from any
> | specific schema lang, and that no single specific schema lang should
> | be normatively referenced in any DocBook spec.
> 
> I don't think I can accept the latter constraint.


If we agree on the former constraint, that's quite cool already :)

> But suppose I could,
> how would you propose to formally describe the structures that are
> valid. What constitutes valid is not an academic question, it has
> direct bearing on how tools work.


I'm not sure what I meant back then, but I do think that there should be 
one normative schema included in the spec (eg a normative/official RNG).
I guess what I meant was that tools processing DocBook documents should 
not be required to support any specific schema language (eg requiring 
WXS+PSVI support for conformance). DTD support is required through the 
XML spec, but ideally the DBX spec should avoid building on this type of 
dependency.

Tobi

P.S.
1. I know that until there's some new entity mechanism we can't fully 
drop DTD.
2. I like and use DTD, but don't want to depend on it.

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