----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Emberson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Ant Developers List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 7:29 AM Subject: Re: Generic Element Containers (generalization of TaskContainer)
> DTDs are for TEXT. > XML Schema are for DATA. > > Is an Ant build file text or data? I would argue that it is data; it > reflects (so to speak) > an object hierarchy. > > Therefore, no time should be wasted on creating a DTD, rather XML Schema > should > be used. > > Richard Emberson > DTDs are a way of describing XML files; a simple one with known limitations on what can be represented. XML Schemas are an alternate description mechanism, much richer but also much more complex. It also has many concepts which make sense to the document people, but not the object people, and seems to exist just to make parsers bigger and more complex. There are other alternatives to XML Schema, some of which make more sense to me, coming from the object/formal methods/AI side of things. But these are neither here nor there. If we had a descriptor for tasks which included enough information, then the appropriate description could be generated in ones XML description language of choice, even RDF if one was so inclined. Having a look at xdoclet and how to use that plus some extra tags on ant tasks, methods and things to generate a task descriptior and/or maybe a schema/DTD of some sort is on my todolist for this week. It could also feed into an xml documentation. -steve -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
