Don’t call me DOM

W3C has just just announced a donation program to help running and developing the validators; given how important these tools are as a fundation to a Quality Web, please consider sharing a bit of love through the program!

As a follow-up on my toying with DTDs, I added a new Python script to my toolbox this morning: dtd-compare.py allows to compare the vocabularies defined in several DTDs to see which elements and attributes are present or absent among them.

For instance, running python dtd-compare.py http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic11.dtd http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd has allowed me to build a comparison of the various mobile XHTML flavors with the content of XHTML 1.0 Strict.

I haven’t included XHTML MP 1.1 and XHTML MP 1.2 in that comparison chart since the officlal DTDs seems to have syntax errors, reported by the script as follows:  Read more... (138 words, estimated 33 secs reading time)

I consider myself fairly fluent in XML technologies, but there is at least one technology that I have never bothered to fully learn, nor that I am planning to ever fully learn, and this would be XML DTDs.

Some people would like DTDs to disappear completely off the face of XML, and while I wouldn’t disagree with them, I still have to live in a world where some markup languages are formalized using DTDs, and even more importantly, where the greatest part of the developed markup language productions is checked using DTD (typically with the W3C Markup Validator).  Read more... (213 words, estimated 51 secs reading time)