Hi Don -
I'm assuming that "subsetting the DTD" refers to the proposal to provide
a simplified CD 1.1 DTD or CD 1.1 "lite."
You probably are aware that the Todd Vincent who expressed the
"over-inclusive but optional" approach to developing the Court Filing
1.1 DTD is the same Todd Vincent who, after working with the CF 1.1 DTD
in the GCAC interoperability pilot, wrote the "Lessons Learned"
document. That paper suggests that "It may, therefore, make sense for
individual jurisdictions to create a 'backwards-compatible subset' of
the Court Filing DTD for specific purposes and requirements."
For clarification, is your concern that "subsetting" the CD 1.1 DTD
should not be addressed in the CD 1.1 spec itself but should be left to
individual jurisdictions to address via court policy standards? It
sounds like the worry is that subsetting the CD 1.1 DTD as part of the
Court Document specification may intrude upon and get crosswise with
court policy standards.
Or is your concern broader - that there should never be subsetting of
the CD 1.1 DTD either by individual jurisdictions or by the CD 1.1 spec?
As far as the Court Document proposal goes, the aim is to offer a single
simplified CD 1.1 DTD (not multiple subsets) as something purely
optional and perhaps easier to get started with than taking on the full
CD 1.1 DTD. The object is to trim from the full CD 1.1 DTD elements and
attributes that are optional and not frequently used in most court
documents, such as the "notarization," "personIdentification" and
"organizationIdentification" elements, some of the optional attributes,
etc. The assumption is that it might be easier to start learning with a
simpler subset of the full DTD. The tradeoff is that a simplified DTD
would be useful for validating basic, "plain vanilla" XML court
documents but not those requiring the richer markup in the full DTD. Of
course, maybe you are suggesting that simplifying the CD 1.1 DTD won't
make it any easier to learn and is not worth pursuing.
Finally, are you concerned that some features of the proposed simplified
CD 1.1 DTD make it an improper subset of the full DTD? If there are some
specific "bloopers" in the simplified Court Document DTD, please let us
know what they are. I'm much more receptive to correction from my
friends than from strangers.
Thanks for sharing the comments.
Rolly
