Once upon a time, the element did but with a #FIXED value. 
Since that was declared in the DTD, one could assume the 
element didn't have to declare it, but that was before 
well-formed only instances.

What is interesting to me is that there seems to be a 
consensus emerging that AFs are useful and that some 
progress can be made starting from that technology 
toward associating semantics with XML instances. 
It may be a modified design before all is said and 
done, but studying AFs has value toward solving the 
problem.

len


From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@[...].com]

I understand how it happens of course... my point was that this assumes some form of process
or validating the instance, so in fact, the *element* doesn't assert which parents are valid
, so much as the {element, parser, DTD(s), and AF processor}. This is what I was reacting to
.

I like AF's (I much prefer them to namespaces!!!) in general, and almost always include  a "
role" attribute for tying such functionality into the application. That said, given the nece
ssary components for validating that an instance conforms to an architecture, it's usually n
ot *necessary* for the element to declare it's architecture... some other form of annotation
 can suffice... and I  imagine that schematron, or RNG would probably suffice for validation
.

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