[ZPT] ZPT - tal-attributes in html-output ?

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fdrake@acm.org
Mon, 2 Apr 2001 13:52:19 -0400 (EDT)


Jim Fulton writes:
 > The term "valid" in XML (and SGML) has a meaning that is more
 > specific than you may realize.  The term "valid" means that a 
 > document conforms to a DTD.  TAL cannot be "valid" in this sense, 
 > because it doesn't conform to a specific DTD. It happens that 
 > xml namespaces and DTDs are currently (at least the last time I checked ;)
 > incompatable. 

  Well, that's not exactly it either.  We could easily write *a* DTD
for it, if we're willing to restrict the prefixes.  But that wouldn't
be the same as letting the users pick an *arbitrary* DTD and make the
results conform to that -- we'd have to pick some W3C HTML DTD.  Well,
we could get fancier and have modified versions of all of them, and
re-write the DOCTYPE declaration on the way out (actually a relatively
reasonable way to do this), but I suspect some of the authoring tools
would have difficulty understanding the use of different doctypes for
editing.
  This is one of those cases where well-formed XML is the right thing,
and monkeying around with validation for intermediate forms is just
distraction.  Adding an option to remove the METAL/TAL attributes from
the output allows the result of transformation to be valid, and I
suspect that's what people really care about.

 > Page templates *are* well formed, which is all most editors care
 > about. Further, the output is well formed.

  And *that's* what's really important!


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Digital Creations