you could just as easily write external software to validate that CVS as well

Not quite. First if you are dealing with sloppy providers they might not include the CVS headers and then how are you going to know which field is missing when that happens?

Then really, DTDs are written using a language designed for language description. You can't really compare it with a programing language, more with the table description part of SQL, or with lex+yacc. For a concrete evidence You can have a look at the IEEE Standards DTD (be warned though, loading the DTD crashes my Mozilla) and tell me how easy it would be to write a Perl program that would parse and validate data tagged according to that DTD (it's SGML, but XML is just the same). I know I'd rather write the DTD and let any parser do the job!

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: XML for databases?!?! Is it just me or is the rest of the world nutz? by mirod
in thread XML for databases?!?! Is it just me or is the rest of the world nutz? by S_Shrum

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