John Cowan <jcowan@[...].com>  wrote:
| Arjun Ray scripsit:

|>  Why must this single "validation DTD" be encompassing rather than merely 
|>  enabling (to use terminology from the AFDR)?
| 
| Can you explain this?  I am not enough of an AF weenie to understand this.

I've already offered:

 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Jan/0217.html

which references:

 http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/wg8/docs/n1920/html/clause-A.3.1.html

I'll try again.

Before you apply a validation DTD to an instance, how do you know whether
it is even appropriate to do so, and if it is, how do you determine to
what parts of the instance it applies?  Once you accept the possibility
that a particular schema may not describe the entirety of a specific
instance - because, for example, the instance may have been composed on
the fly with "imports" from <booming-voice> Namespaces</> that the schema
developers had no chance to know about - then it follows that a schema
cannot predict in advance to what parts of an instance of discretionary
provenance it could apply.  Rather, it would be up to the document to map
its various parts to the various schemas that the instance composer had to
have known about.  IOW, a mapping is always involved - even if it's a
trivial identity transformation - and this is what needs formalization,
not how to colonify names.  

| Make a proposal for such an annotation mechanism, then, by all means.

The basic idea would be the ArchUse PI, converted to declaration syntax,
covering, at a minimum, the concepts underlying public-id, dtd-public-id,
doc-elem-form, form-att and renamer-att.  

| >  | Why people want to use namespaces, or why they shouldn't, is out of scope.
| >  
| >  I call this ostrichism.
| 
| I call it anti-dogmatism.

AFAICT, Namespaces are dogma.  The anti-dogmatic view would question them.
While the XML-SIG was in existence, the spec never made it past the WD
stage.  Once SIG was dissolved, the solution in search of a problem sailed
through to Rec status.  Because papal bulls from 50,000 feet would not
have it any other way.  

Oh, excuse me, I forgot.  In W3C-speak, there is no such thing as "dogma".
It's "axiom of architecture".


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