DTD declarations in XML docs

[Perry Molendijk <pe...@inflexions.com>]

BlankHello

Recently there has been a thread in regards to expanding DTD comments. There were quite a few suggestions as to what could be done to resolve the problem and I think the original "poster" did get it to work. However, I think I tried every combination of suggested solutions and Xindice versions and I still can't get it to work.

What I would like to achieve is to add a document to Xindice with for example the Simple DocBook DTD declaration in the header:

<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Simplified DocBook XML V1.0//EN"
"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/simple/1.0/sdocbook.dtd">

And then to to retrieve it just like that.

Because the DTD I want to use is not 100% stable I don't want to go the way of normalising the DTD yet.

I am not too fussed about which version of Xindice it will work in 1.0 or CVS.

Regards,

Perry Molendijk

Re: DTD declarations in XML docs

[Murray Altheim <m....@open.ac.uk>]

Perry Molendijk wrote:
> Hello
>  
> Recently there has been a thread in regards to expanding DTD comments. 
> There were quite a few suggestions as to what could be done to resolve 
> the problem and I think the original "poster" did get it to work. 
> However, I think I tried every combination of suggested solutions and 
> Xindice versions and I still can't get it to work.
>  
> What I would like to achieve is to add a document to Xindice with for 
> example the Simple DocBook DTD declaration in the header:
>  
> <!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Simplified DocBook XML V1.0//EN"
> "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/simple/1.0/sdocbook.dtd">
>  
> And then to to retrieve it just like that.
>  
> Because the DTD I want to use is not 100% stable I don't want to go the 
> way of normalising the DTD yet.
>  
> I am not too fussed about which version of Xindice it will work in 1.0 
> or CVS.

Someone should correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression of having used
and developed using Xindice 1.0 is that it stores XML document instances,
and only XML document instances. While that may seem a rather curious
statement, it's not in the context of XML, which has both the concept of
a prolog and and a document instance (something sadly lost on much of the
current output from the W3C). The prolog is the "pre-processor" information
given to the processor/parser prior to encountering the document instance,
such as entity declarations, and of course the document element for the
given document and the schema information, i.e., the external subset or
DTD.

Xindice is only storing the document instance, not the prolog, nor the
information about the external subset, which is what you want. IOW, you
want to store the public and system identifiers as well as the specified
document element, these are the three things found in a typical DOCTYPE
declaration.

What I've done in my own application is use the XNode API to store this
as metadata with the document instance. XNode acts as a SOAP-like wrapper
around the instance, allowing a location for such metadata without
polluting the document instance.

On the subject of XNode, Brian Behlendorf has suggested I take the XNode
API to the Incubator group to see if we can bring it into Apache properly.
I've made some substantial modifications to XNode to allow for embedded
XML metadata (e.g., RDF) as well as a listener support, which I've found
quite valuable in inter-app communication.

Anyway, that's the short and long of it.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                         http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK                    .

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