Re: DOCBOOK: Re: XHTML tables

[Paul Grosso <pgrosso at arbortext dot com>]

At 10:43 2003 03 04 -0600, Alex Russell wrote:

>The co-existance problem can look simple in some trivial cases, but it gets 
>messy in a hurry unless each shared element type has a mode attribute 
>assigned to it (in which case, we're no better off than with namespace 
>prefixes).
>
>I'd love to be wrong about this, but I just don't see an elegant way to 
>reconcile the two models without namespace prefixes (which are a 
>non-starter for previously outlined reasons).

See [1] for my summary analysis.  

(Note that when I use the notation such as html:table or cals:table, 
I am NOT suggesting that namespaces are to be used in the resulting DTD, 
I am merely using that notation as a convenience in my email to refer 
to logically different concepts.)

It is trivial for an application to tell if a properly marked up
table is either a CALS table or an HTML table with no namespaces
and no extra attributes.  

However, it is not possible for a DTD to prohibit markup that would 
be neither a valid CALS table nor a valid HTML table (i.e., a hybrid 
table).  Such can only be "prohibited" via a statement in the DocBook 
spec, not via a DTD.  (I don't see this as a problem.  There are lots 
of semantically invalid things you can do right now that the DTD cannot 
catch.  Such is the nature of DTDs.  But others feel otherwise.)

paul

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200212/msg00003.html