Re: DocBook XSD will be discontinued

Norm Tovey-Walsh <[email protected]> Sun, 14 Aug 2022 08:57:00 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.text.docbook.misc
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Peter Flynn <[email protected]> writes:
> On 13/08/2022 16:47, Norm Tovey-Walsh wrote:
>> Jürgen Purtz <[email protected]> writes:
>>> On 17.01.17 00:07, Bob Stayton wrote:
> [...]
>>> Will there be a DTD in 5.2? Are there plans for DTD in 6.x?
>> A DTD would, in principle, be possible as well, but even less useful
>> as it would be both non-normative and have no (actual) support for
>> namespaces.
>
> As those people using DTDs (eg in publishing) are probably not worried
> about normativeness, and even less worried about namespaces, they
> would probably be happy with a DTD that just replicates 5.2's or 6.x's
> changes to element types, content models, and attributes, where that
> is possible, and if it is relevant for what is essentially
> paper/pdf/epub.

Perhaps. I said “(actual)” with respect to namespaces because I expect
you’re right, picking some standard prefixes would probably satisfy most
people. But there are now a number of pervasive content model
constraints that can’t be enforced in DTDs, so validation against the
DTD wouldn’t mean you had valid documents.

>> Years ago, I thought it would be possible to generate XSD and DTD
>
> It's grown, and become much more powerful than DTDs were ever
> envisaged for, and I'm not sure many people still use XSD, do they?

There’s certainly plenty of use out there; some of the newer features in
1.1 go a long way to making it easier to use. But I still don’t think
XSD models prose documents very well. And like DTDs can’t capture some
of the constraints of DocBook.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norman Tovey-Walsh <[email protected]>
https://nwalsh.com/

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