Subject: Re: Alternative *ML syntaxes From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 19 Nov 2002 00:01:02 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3246652862008190@naggum.no> * Henrik Motakef | May I infer that you have a DTD parser lying around somewhere? Maybe | even a fully SGML-conformant one? In Common Lisp? Care to share? ;-) As sharing in any way could be construed as encouragement to use SGML or XML, I have to decline. | However, even if DTDs are still somehow priviledged in XML compared to | other schema languages (simply by being part of the XML 1.* spec), in | practice the only thing you really /need/ a DTD for are entity | declarations (and notations, but they aren't too useful in XML anyway). That the DTD is sort of "implied" by the application or the instance in no way negates it. Although some elements may have sub-element contents according to their own position in the hierarchy, which could be hard to express in a "standard" DTD, sender and receiver even of XML-encoded data need to agree on /something/. The situation may not actually be better than it was absent the stupid tags, but the only thing you have on an XML without a pre-agreed structure is attributes and sub-elements and data. | What do you do with XML applications that lack a DTD, most prominent | example being XSLT? Do you simply ignore them, or do you construct a DTD | from what you get? I try to ignore XSLT. Most of the time, document instances have enough information to construct useful content models and keep track of which things are attributes. It is not particularly hard. The biggest problem is in fact that some users actually need the retarded syntax. -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.