Re: [xml-dev] The task to be solved by RDDL.

At 16:55 19/01/2002 -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>At 10:58 AM +0100 1/19/02, Nicolas Lehuen wrote:
>
>>-- namespace-centricity, limiting RDDL to describing namespace meta-data,
>>whereas what we really need is to describe document meta-data (think of a
>>DOCTYPE declaration but not limited to DTDs).
>
>The  you need something other than RDDL. This is not what RDDL was meant 
>to do, nor did RDDL ever claim to do this. A RDDL document describes a 
>namespace, not a document. What you propose might be useful in and of 
>itself, but it would replace RDDL.

I disagree -- there is nothing in RDDL itself which prevents it being used 
to describe the resources associated with a document type. The problem is 
that XML has no built in way of specifying the resource which is that 
document type -- the system identifier in the DOCTYPE declaration is too 
strongly tied to DTD retrieval to be usable for the purpose.

I think the W3C takes the view that there is nothing interesting to be said 
about a document type as a whole which is not simply an assembly of the 
statements you can make about the element types in that document. I'm not 
sure whether I agree with this, but it's not an RDDL issue.

I suppose one could try to establish a convention that, on the root element 
of a document, something like

    <root
       xmlns:dt="http://www.doctype.org/"
       dt:doctype="http://myorg.com/some-doctype"
    >

specifies the type of the document as a whole. If this were done, it would 
make perfect sense for this dt:doctype URI to point at an RDDL document.

-- 
Cheers,
John