Re: Images & mouseovers

At 21:41 27/09/00 +0100, David Meadows wrote:
>My point was: SGML is a very robust, versatile technology. Its central idea
>is that all documents *must* have a DTD. The DTD ensures that your documents
>are properly structured and that they can correctly interpreted ("rendered",
>if you like) by your intended audience. Then XML comes along and starts
>cutting corners, throwing out all element of SGML which are deemed
>unnecessary. One of the things thrown out is the requirement for a DTD. This
>may be convenient for the [lazy] XML writer, but it's not a robust solution.

Exactly - and one of the advantages of XML is that it can be used for 
NON-robust solutions.

There are some projects for which the time spent developing a DTD would be 
a waste of time (take the case of Kynn's resume).  In such cases adherence 
to a "strict" standard is ludicrous.  Why waste time reverse-engineering a 
DTD once he has decided what form to use?  The next time he updates it, he 
may want to add new sections which would then violate the previous DTD.

An analogous situation would be databases.  To you or I, we'd probably 
associate the term "database" with a fully functional relational database 
management system (akin to valid XML).

However there are a large number of people out there to whom the term 
"database" represents one ginormous table of information, probably stored 
in Excel.  For this large group of people (the non-power users) the concept 
of "well-formed" will be sufficient.

For the record, I'm a fan of DTD's :-)


Chris Higgs <c.higgs(at)landfood.unimelb.edu.au>
Institute of Land and Food Resources
University of Melbourne http://www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au

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