RE: DTD Question

Ronald Bourret (rbourret@ito.tu-darmstadt.de)
Sat, 17 Oct 1998 15:01:24 +0200

You are not missing anything tremendously obvious, although you might =
want to take a look at the namespaces proposal =
(http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xml-names). This allows scoping, although not =
as easily as in your average programming language. (Sorry -- I forgot =
to mention it before.)

I'm not convinced that having only global variables dooms a language. =
It might make it more difficult to use, but I don't think there are any =
programs that can be written with locally scoped variables that can't be =
written with only global variables. I'm also not convinced that =
document languages have the same requirements as programming languages. =
HTML might not be the best document language in the world, but it is =
limited to global variables and it has enjoyed a rather modest success =
;)

-- Ron Bourret

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From: Samuel R. Blackburn
Sent: Saturday, October 17, 1998 1:21 PM
To: Ronald Bourret; xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Subject: Re: DTD Question

Many thanks. I was afraid of that.

It seems that trying to force a "flat" typing paradigm onto
somethings that is inherently nested is doomed. It is like
having a programming language where all variables are
global (they cannot be scoped to specific functions).

I'm new to all of this and trying to make sense of it.
Am I missing something tremendously obvious?

Sam