I just sent this proposal to the XML developers at Sun:
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How about an API to expose the DTD?
A simple collection of entries would be sufficient, I think.
-- something about as structured as a DTD is.
One potential reason:
* XML has no mechanism to distinguish between "structure" and
"inline" tags.
* That distinction makes intelligent XML editing possible.
(See http://www.treelight.com/software/XmlEditor.html)
* One way to attack that issue (presented in the paper) is
to predefine the elements that are "inline" in the editor.
* Another way that occurs to me is to establish the convention
that all such elements are defined in a DTD-entity named
"inline".
The DTD could then be inspected for that definition, and tags
contained in it treated as inline elements -- if editors could
access the DTD easily.
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Notes:
* It's a bit half-baked, but could be part of an OHS solution.
* It would allow a DTD to define arbitrary new tags as
inlinable.
* Unfortunately, though, it wouldn't define how they should
be displayed (as bold, or ul, or what have you).
* It still doesn't solve the problem of having a higher
validation standard than they typical editor understands.
(On the other hand, any editor that *does* understand that
validation standard could interoperate freely with the mail
client -- and that may well be sufficient.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Aug 21 2001 - 17:57:51 PDT