[capidl] Re: [EROS-Arch] capidl alive again

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

> I've asked a friend who knows a lot more about the difference to reply.
If
> you don't get an answer by Monday, let me know.  The main problem I know
of
> with DTDs is their limited expressiveness.
>
> _________________________
> Alan Karp

Alan: suggest this conversation should copy capidl.

DTDs definitely lack some important stuff, and in a couple of cases the
expressive power they lack was foolish ommissions rather than true
simplifications.

The primary impediment to XML Schemas, at the moment, is that there doesn't
appear to be a non-java open-source XML/XSLT processing suite that knows how
to validate against xml schemas. libxml2 only does DTDs, and that settled
only recently. I don't suppose that XML schema validation would be all that
hard to add, but I'm not eager to bite off yet another project here. The
blocker here is that the EROS build process cannot rely on Java, because I'm
not going to pay sun for the privilege of a JDK port to native EROS.

I think that the best solution for now is likely to turn out to be using a
DTD and allowing for cutover to XML schemas when support for them is widely
available in non-java form

shap