<edu:ml> and DTD management

[Bruno Vernier <vernier@vc.bc.ca>]

On Tue, Dec 15, 1998 at 12:16:14PM -0800, Duane Morin wrote:

> I managed a guy once who wrote one for me, does that count? :)  

You are doing a great job managing me... thanks Duane; keep it up :-)

> Bruno (and perhaps this is a better discussion for offline), can 
> you fill me in on where the notion of using <edu:ml> as a tag 
> came from?  I can't find any other examples of XML/DTD that use a :
> in a tagname like that - any special reason for it?  Typically in
> the samples I'm seeing, the root tag is just another english tag
> like the others.

This is an XML namespace (which I read about in some official looking XML
websites) to avoid namspace pollution and allow several XML tag sets to
co-reside;  for example MATHML combined with EDUML (in case there are tag
homonyms)... this assumes no one else will use "edu:" as a class name (there
is no registry of such classes as of yet) 

<edu:ml>
 EDUML specific tags ... etc...
 </edu:ml>
<math:stuff>
 MATHML specific tags ...
 </math:stuff>

The :ml part is arbitrary and allows us to have several root tags:

> Are people thinking to see this in one big DTD (and, by extension, have 
> all data come from one big data source)?  Or break it up into several 
> logic DTDs?  I'm in favor of the latter, myself.  Not only
> will each DTD be cleaner, but programs could be written that only
> read in the data they need.  An attendance program doesn't necessarily
> need to know the address of the school, for example.  EDUML, therefore, 
> would simply be defined as "The following collection of DTDs to choose 
> from".

That was my original idea in EDUML v0.3 but we then combined them into one
big root tag ... I note that the DOCBOOK and MATHML DTD as I understand them
are not split up externally but rather use internal tricks to achieve that
effect. My current thinking is to perhaps use SATML from Teresa Ferrandez
for our test bank and to keep the administration stuff together in EDUML.
(and have the two live together as shown above)

Bruno