Re: wd-xml-names: external dtd subsets (and external entities

Tim Bray (tbray@textuality.com)
Tue, 11 Aug 1998 12:36:25 -0700


At 09:28 PM 8/11/98 +0200, james anderson wrote:
>II. please establish a method to bind a prefix which covers the internal and
>external dtd subsets.

This was discussed by the WG and eventually voted down; the advantages
of the attribute approach, combined with the desire to avoid having
multiple ways to do the same thing, led to the PI approach being
amputated.

>without such a mechanism, the dtd's denotation is undefined.

I don't understand what you mean by "denotation". In general, the
usefulness of your postings would be improved by more attention
to the use of terminology, and where you need to use a new term
(e.g. "extent" in your previous posting and "denotation" here) you
should provide a definition for it.

>if, on the other hand, such a mechanism is provided, then validation is
>possible on the basis of namespace-aware 1.0 conformant dtd's.

Only trivially so. As I have pointed out, the hard part is not matching
up the names, it's making compound DTDs. I have also pointed out how
a mechanical instance/DTD rewrite could address some of the issues
of namespace-aware validation. I have not suggested a solutoin for
how to solve the *hard* problem, namely how to go about making a
compound DTD, and would like to hear input on that. -Tim