RE: What are schemata

Tim Bray (tbray@textuality.com)
Sun, 31 May 1998 13:00:55 -0700


>> | So is a schema a function that maps a document to a truth value?
>>
>> I'd rather say that it is a definition of a set of documents, just as
>> a formal language is usually considered to be the set of sentences
>> that are well-formed in that language.

Hmm, this line of thought may be perpetuating what I see as one of
the shortcomings of DTDs, namely that the DTD has to describe the
whole document, i.e. a class of languages. What about partial
validation/constraints? I think it's important that child-of-DTD
support compond documents & partial validation. So in the terms above,
maybe these things define sets of elements and attributes, rather
than whole documents. -Tim