[relaxng-user] Re: association of RELAX NG with a document

[Peter Ring]

Thanks for the pointer to the XHTML DOCTYPE discussion; I'm going to 
read up on ISO/IEC 10744:1997.

To sum up for now, I'd prefer not to (have to) put schema-specific in 
the documents, given that the assertion shouldn't be specific to a 
particular schema language (or any other processing). I'd prefer not to 
maintain an unbounded number of ways to facilitate essentially the same 
thing (to classify a document and take appropriate action).

Also, given that the main point of using XML is neutral storage and 
interchange, it would shure be nice if we had a few common access points 
that all XML producers and consumers could rely on. While I can 
establish a local way of representing the class of a document, I can't 
expect the off-the-shelf applications that we use today to know about 
it. And, there's no way I can know which XML producers and consumers 
I'll have to deal with tomorrow.

Of course, it's not the duty of Relax NG to solve this problem. It's 
just that Relax NG is a hot spot for this discussion right now.

Kind regards
Peter Ring

James Clark wrote:

<snip/>
> The assertion shouldn't be specific to a particular schema language. The
> assertion should be an assertion that the document belongs to a
> particular abstract type; an abstract document type involves more than
> just the (usually infinite) set of documents belonging to the type;
> there's also semantics, whether formal or informal.
> 
> There is no standardized way to make such an assertion. It's not the job
> of RELAX NG (or indeed of any particular schema language) to standardize
> such a mechanism.  If you want there to be a standard way, I suggest you
> take it up with the W3C or some other standards body. 
> 
> I agree that it's often desirable to have a document include information
> about the abstract type to which it belongs.  But it's up to you to
> decide how your documents should represent this information, just like
> it's up to you to decide how they should represent any other
> information. If namespaces aren't enough, then use a PI or use an
> attribute on the document element. The choice is yours. A schema
> association mechanism should be able to make use of whatever reasonable
> way you've chosen rather than mandate a particular way.