Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] strange DTD changes

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

On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 12:01:20AM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> I'm open to arguments for why we should or should not use the <person> 
> tag in place of RFC822.


So, I happened on Eric Baudais on irc the other day, and we had the
following enlightening discussion:

[...]
 * LotR thwaps drake for writing such a lousy one
<drake> I was just doing as I was told to anyways.  I think SK should
        use V2 of OMF anyways.
<drake> I wrote the DTD for that one with an emphasis on
        compliance with V1.0 of the OMF.
<LotR> there's a newer version of the OMF spec then?
<drake> Yes, it does things The Right Way (tm).  It's either 1.2
        of 2.0...cannot remember which now.  SK uses the older OMF spec.
<LotR> url?
<LotR> (the website only seems to have 1.0)
<drake> Look at the DTD at
        http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/metadata/OMF.dtd
<LotR> oh, that's newer?
<drake> Also take a look at
        http://dulug.duke.edu/~mark/docs/dtds/xml/omf-1.1/index.html
<LotR> now I'm really confused
<LotR> was there also a 1.0 DTD?
<drake> Yes, that is the one I modified and SK uses.
<LotR> but earlier OMF files already used the <person> bits from
       more recent DTDs
<drake> What SK was using prior was a format halfway between OMF
        1.0 and OMF 1.1.  I do not think that OMF 1.0 defined <person>.
<LotR> oh
<LotR> so why was the decision made to use V1.0?
<LotR> and if you think we should use a newer version, could you
       weigh in on the current thread I started?
<drake> I don't think there was a decision, but SK had always been
        using V1.0.
<drake> Okay, I think that Dan told me that V1.0 of OMF never had
        a DTD, but V1.1 of OMF did.
<drake> I looked at the V1.1 DTD and saw there were serious
        changes between the published documentation from OMF and the DTD.
<drake> Example: There is a toplevel element <versionGroup> which
        has a child of <version>.  <version> has children <id>, <date>,
        and <description>.
<LotR> yeah, the newer ones are much better xml
<drake> This contradicts what the OMF element description says,
        which is that there is one element <version> with three
        attributes, version.identifier, version.date, and
        version.description.
<drake> Since Dan had been using and relying on the V1.0
        documentation, I just reconstructed what the DTD would be like
        if one was written for V1.0.  Then I modified it for SK's
        specific uses.
<LotR> the OMF people are obviously not very good at version
       management :)
<drake> Yes, it's rather a mess.
<drake> That is the basic history and a lot of my thoughts on how
        I wrote the DTD which is now in SK.
<drake> Now that we have something defined, I think people can
        make cases on whether the DTD is good for SK or if it should be
        modified and updated.
[...]

So, it seems the spec was for version 1.0 of the DTD (which doesn't seem
to have ever existed), and old scrollkeeper versions seem to have used
some version of the 1.1 version of the DTD. Hopefully we can change back
to basing the scrollkeeper DTD on the latest OMF DTD, which is much more
sane ASAP after the gnome 2.0 release. I'll try to create a DTD based on
it, with the extra information scrollkeeper wants, like the <relation> tag,
and send it to the list for discussion.


Martijn