Member Submission - Note

Date: Jan. 19, 1999
Link: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-ddml
Source Author or Organization: xml-dev

Excerpted from "Introduction" and "Origin and Goals": "DTDs have limited expressiveness and it is necessary to experiment with new ideas in schema design. These ideas include a syntax that is more like that of XML document content, certain kinds of extensibility and a cleaner separation between parsing and verifying. DDML is an experimental schema language designed to provide a starting point for these experiments."

"So that DDML documents will be immediately useful with existing software, the DDML specification will describe a conversion from DDML documents to DTDs. This initial version of the DDML specification is deliberately simple, providing an initial base for implementations while introducing as few complicating factors as possible. Authors accustomed to DTD creation will find their tool set constricted; it is hoped that supporting software and tools available from other standards will make up for this reduced tool set."