OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

docbook message

[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]


Subject: RE: [docbook] Re: [DBX5] Is this a DocBook document?


I've been digging in xml-dev archives and other good places for discussions
about DOCTYPEs, FPIs and entity resolution. It's a bit like finding a pile
of old magazines in a mountain cabin on a rainy day ;) 

I'm perhaps a bit obsessed with versioning, dependencies and entity
resolution. It seems to me that these issues were better recognized in the
good olde SGML days. Maybe because most of the users were involved in
manufacturing industries (mil and aerospace) with strict requirements for
configuration management.

IMHO, the virtue of the old SGML DOCTYPE is _not_ that it can be an address,
a resolvable reference to processing/validating rules; rather, it's the
availability of a name, a (formal) public identifier, that's important. The
DOCTYPE declaration is a contract between the document producer and the
document consumers.

It's unfortunate that DOCTYPEs are intrisically associated with a specific
schema language; how can a document know which schema language I want to
use? I want to assert something about my document, something outside the
document and shared with other documents, something with a name. I want to
say 'this is a type dbx5+svg+ebnf+my-own-blend document', and leave it up to
processing how to consume this name.

If we just had schema language neutral DOCTYPEs ... or maybe that would just
be yet another variant of namespaces and notations?

kind regards
Peter Ring


-----Original Message-----
From: Norman Walsh [mailto:ndw@nwalsh.com]
Sent: 30. september 2003 14:41
To: Tobias Reif
Cc: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [docbook] Re: [DBX5] Is this a DocBook document?


<snip />

| If we want to escape reliance on DTD, we need to find new ways for
| providing the information that we provided via DTD doctype
| declarations. Namespace name and version attribute will also have the
| advantage of being accessible from XSLT, thus are also useful in
| documents which do have a doctype declaration (and ns/version can also
| be used with inlined fragments).

PIs would also work.

 <?schema language="http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0";
          public-id="-//OASIS//??? DocBook V4.3b4//EN"
          system-id="http://docbook.org/rng/4.3b4/docbook.rng";?>

<snip />


[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]