From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2001-12-14T12:27:03+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28481] Re: DTD Parsers in Ruby?

Oliver M. Bolzer wrote:
> Yea, DTDs are cool. I totally agree. Learned my HTML reading DTDs in the
> old days. I'll never look at an XML-Schema (XSD) until I really do have no
> other choice again :-)    (Being able to specify stuff context-sensitively
> is niche feature but XSDs still suck (long story won't be told))

A niche feature, eh?  How about attribute value types?  And real XML-based 
syntax, rather than a hacked variation of SGML?

DTDs require special processing, and make XML processors inordinately 
complex.  When dealing with SGML, the additional code to process DTDs is 
dwarfed by the load of supporting all of the SGML features... but requiring 
XML processors to support them was, well, dumb.

The extra code required to support DTDs in REXML, for example, constitutes 
a full 11% of the entire code base -- and this is for really trivial 
support, amounting to little more than mostly ignoring the DTDs and not 
allowing them to screw up the rest of the processing.  A waste of space.

IM(not so humble)O.

-- 
--- SER