Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: XInclude doesn't validate with xmllint

[Daniel Veillard <veillard at redhat dot com>]

On Sun, Dec 01, 2002 at 09:07:45PM -0800, Bob Stayton wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 01, 2002 at 11:38:07AM +0100, Yann Dirson wrote:
> > My opinion is still that we need to be able to validate before, and that
> > does not prevent to validate after as well.
[...]
> > Yes, and IMHO not adding the xinclude elements to the DTD will effectively
> > constraint the use case of DocBook.
> 
> It isn't that we (the DocBook Technical Committee) don't
> want to add an xinclude element, or that we think it is 
> not needed.  It would be easy to add an xinclude
> element to the DTD.  But that isn't enough, because
> the xinclude element must appear
> in content models for it to be useful.
[...]
> Consider also that xincludes are very much like system
> entity references.  A system entity reference can replace
> just about any content in a document. And everyone seems to
> accept the fact that the document cannot be validated until
> the system entities are resolved.  Validating XML editors
> must be able to resolve system entities to be truly
> validating. Why not extend that mechanism to resolve
> xincludes?  It seems that the hard part has already been
> done, now they just need to handle some different syntax
> for specifying the included text. 

  I would just like to add the point that in most cases where XInclude
is used to remplace external parsed entities, while you cannot validate
the top document, one can still validate the included documents. I think
that's the key point for usability, in the sense that if the document
is being worked my multiple authors, each of them can actually validate
their piece while they work. And if they use XInclude at their level,
they should have no trouble to validate their subtree after XInclude
processing.
  I'm actually quite pleased with the way XInclude is getting used (at
least in the community I follow), I was thinking the ability to validate
subdocument would be the key reason to use it, but in fact the capability
to include text part like code examples coming from external files
untouched seems to be the most used feature here, parse="text" is a winner :-)

Daniel

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