Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] strange DTD changes

[Martijn v. B. <ma...@ee...>]

On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 12:01:20AM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> Hi Martijn,
> 
> I had a similar reluctance to doing away with the beauty and convention of
> XML and <person>.  The reason why we are currently recommending the form
> "lo...@us... (Martijn van Beers)" is because that is what
> is specified by the OMF spec for <creator>.  To quote the spec:

Hrm, very strange. According to their DTD
(http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/metadata/OMF.dtd) you do
use <person>. Also, their OMF generation CGI also uses the <person>

... After reading some of the omf list archives (and I thought other
web interfaces to mailing lists were horrid!) ...

It seems like you guys have assumed the 'spec' to be authorative,
while they seem to be saying ask. 

> I'm open to arguments for why we should or should not use the <person> 
> tag in place of RFC822.

* XML is a markup language. you mark up things humans understand
  already, so an application can easily make sense of them too.
  rfc822 format is not an example of this
* the original matches much better with DocBook's author/etc tags

While we're discussing changes, why was category changed into an
attribute
<subject category="foo" />

instead of
<subject>foo</subject>

I really don't see any advantages of this. (and why does gnome need it's
own category anyway?)

I do like the new syntax for <format>, but it may be a good idea to
add an optional attribute to specify an url where to fetch the DTD

Another thing I don't like in the changed DTD is how rights turned
into one element with just attributes
<rights>
	<license name="FDL" version="1.1" url="foo" />
	<holder>joe shmoe</holder>
</rights>

makes much more sense than the way it is now.
Another regression from the original DTD is the <version> tag. putting
things like a description into an attribute really doesn't make much
sense.

(http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200205/msg01027.html for a good
thread on element vs. attribute)


Martijn