Re: XSL-like DTD

[Francis Norton <francis@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am coming to think very heretical thoughts. Surely XML is all about
explicit markup? And being equally human and machine readable?

Would it be totally crazy to propose that we abolish nested
content-models for a simple schema standard? 

This would allow the content model for any one element to be "all",
"sequence", "choice", "mixed", "empty", or "any". If you want a compound
structure, eg "(head, (p | list | note)*, div2*)", then you take the the
nested structure - in this case "(p | list | note)*" - and invent an
element with that content model as a container for that part of the
content.

Admittedly this is more verbose, but I have been looking at the "all"
compositor in XML Schema, and while my views may be coloured by the fact
that I am attempting to use pure XSLT, I'm now convinced that having an
"all" at the top of a deeply nested element content model simply takes
exponential time to process and probably cannot be validated by the hand
for any sufficiently complex document. Why are we flying so far from the
spirit of XML?

Francis.


Nikita Ogievetsky wrote:
> 
> For more on this please see:
> http://www.redrice.com/ci/generatingXslValidators.html
> and
> http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/xslAsValidator19990124.html
>


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