On 3/3/2012 14:04, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> It's not possible to type exotic characters.

Sure it is. I just turned on chinese for my wife. Use alt-shift to toggle 
between languages. :-)

The problem is that your *editor* doesn't make it simple to type exotic 
characters, yes? Why do you complain that your XML processor doesn't 
understand exotic characters when its your editor that makes them difficult 
to type?

> ...aaaand then watch it break into a thousand pieces because raw text files
> have no way of specifying what actual character encoding is being used. :-P

That's why the first line of your XML document includes the character set in 
which the rest of the document is written. *right there* is the reason you 
have to put <?xml ...> at the start, along with the funky code number for 
your character set.

> The problem is, the only real documentation on how to write DTDs is the
> antiquated SGML reference documentation, which is hardly easy going. From
> what I've seen from other written DTDs, it's just damned hard, that's all.

It's actually pretty straightforward. Google "dtd tutorial".

> It would be frighteningly easy to come up with
> an XHTML+MathML DTD where the XHTML part doesn't actually match the
> stand-alone XHTML DTD, for example.

Sure. And it would be frighteningly easy to come up with a generic sorting 
algorithm that works incorrectly on certain types. Don't do that.

The point is that a DTD is a type specification. It also originally 
specified what closing tags could be left out by specifying what could be 
nested inside what. (You don't have to close a paragraph in a book if the 
next tag opens a new chapter, because chapters don't nest and paragraphs 
can't contain chapters.)

So don't use a DTD. Use an XSL or whatever they call it these days.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

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