Re: [VCARDDAV] use of DTD in draft-ietf-vcarddav-carddav-06, was: vcarddav WGLC on draft-ietf-vcarddav-{carddav, mkcol}

Cyrus Daboo wrote:
> ...
>> 2) The XML spec reference needs to be updated to W3C.REC-xml-20081126,
>> just as in draft-ietf-vcarddav-webdav-mkcol-04. (Note I'd recommend to
>> use a shorter reference name, such as just "XML".
> 
> Reference updated. I am just using the xml2rfc default for <?rfc 
> symrefs="yes"?>.
> ...

Yep. xml2rfc's default IMHO is wrong, and results in bad readability.

Here's a replacement:

<reference anchor="XML" 
target="http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/">
   <front>
     <title>Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition)</title>
     <author initials="T." surname="Bray" fullname="Tim Bray">
       <organization>Textuality and Netscape</organization>
       <address>
         <email>[email protected]</email>
       </address>
     </author>
     <author initials="J." surname="Paoli" fullname="Jean Paoli">
       <organization>Microsoft</organization>
       <address>
         <email>[email protected]</email>
       </address>
     </author>
     <author initials="C.M." surname="Sperberg-McQueen" fullname="C. M. 
Sperberg-McQueen">
       <organization>W3C</organization>
       <address>
         <email>[email protected]</email>
       </address>
     </author>
     <author initials="E." surname="Maler" fullname="Eve Maler">
       <organization>Sun Microsystems</organization>
       <address>
         <email>[email protected]</email>
       </address>
     </author>
     <author initials="F." surname="Yergeau" fullname="Francois Yergeau">
       <organization/>
     </author>
     <date day="26" month="November" year="2008"/>
   </front>
   <seriesInfo name="W3C" value="REC-xml-20081126"/>
</reference>

>> 3) I had trang (<http://www.thaiopensource.com/relaxng/trang.html>) parse
>> the DTD fragments for me (to do that just markup the artwork with the
>> proper type of "application/xml-dtd", then use rfc2629xslt's
>> extract-artwork.xslt
>> (<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629xslt/rfc2629xslt.html#extract-a
>> rtwork>).
>>
>> A minor issue I found is that at least one element type definition
>> (addressbook) appeared multiple times; this is not really a problem as
>> long as they all say the same thing.
>>
>> On the other hand, address-data has three different definitions (see
>> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-vcarddav-carddav-06#section-10.4>)
>> , depending on the context it's used in. I think this really should be
>> avoided. The simplest fix for this seems to just use three distinct 
>> names.
> 
> Well we did have calendar-data in CalDAV do the same. I am OK with 
> making a change if others think it is worth doing.

I think in the long term the right approach would be not to use DTD 
fragments anymore, and to use RelaxNG instead.

But while we're using DTDs, I absolutely recommend to use them in a way 
so that at least in theory they can be used. One alternative approach 
would be to use "ANY", and put all the remaining restrictions into prose.

That being said, it seems to me that adding more specific elements 
actually would make the vocabulary easier to understand.

BR, Julian