Philosophic thought about _PARTIAL_VALIDATION

["ura" <ura@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, listers

I'm very interesting any opinions in such subject as _PARTIAL_VALIDATION_ of
documents.
I mean following. Is it possible? In which approaches and/or tools? how?
Does anybody know the precedents?
Or it's a _BAD_ idea in principle? Why, if so?

In some small note within one doc I've discovered the next sentence:

>> "Although it is legal to define a language containing non-terminals that
>>  never resolve to terminals, such as one with purely circular
definitions,
>>  it is generally impossible and/or _USELESS_ to create any valid
>>  documents for such languages."
 (I underlined the term "USELESS" here)

Why? Why it is USELESS? Example:
Let I have a master document, authored by me, and this has "include"
of the bulk of well-formed (but not validated yet) documents,
authored by my boy-fellow (Pete, John, etc).
For certainty I talk about the construction such as:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE DOC [
<!ENTITY subdoc_1 SYSTEM "link_to_1.xml">
<!ENTITY subdoc_2 SYSTEM "link_to_2.xml">]
<!ENTITY subdoc_3 SYSTEM "link_to_3.xml">
...
]>
<?xml-stylesheets type="text/xsl" href="DOC.XSL"?>

<DOC title="Master Document">
<subdoc_1>&subdoc_1;</subdoc_1>
<subdoc_2>&subdoc_2;</subdoc_2>
 ...
</DOC>

However, what if John has finished to now only x% of his part?
But at the same time Peter's document is valid and Bobby's too.
The real thing here is that the MSXML, for example,
gets render/shows such well-formed, (but "not valid yet") documents
perfectly!
And really BAD thing is that (msxml) parser-errorer even
does not try to specify the localization of bad part of such "composed" DTD.
Is it a good principle?

So, validation of ready parts is the sole problem now - of course,
parser (for example, msxml) require for validation only full (!) DTD.

So, is it good that one decided that the PARTIAL_VALIDATION is not useful?
It's universal answer? Really?
Why couldn't I wish to get tool that will validate only my "ready pieces"?
What about permanent changes of many different pieces and pages?

If my thought would be "generally impossible",
then it is another story and of course, I'll discard my question.

P. S. Sorry if my English is not such as good.

Best regards,
       J Bim Taler



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