[tei-council] @predeclare

[Stuart A. Yeates]

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 4:27 AM, Sebastian Rahtz
<sebastian.rahtz at oucs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On 23 May 2012, at 16:48, Martin Holmes wrote:
>
>>  - What is it actually doing? In other words, what are the implications
>> of a <classSpec> being predeclared or not predeclared?
>
> when you make a DTD, the classes and macros are turned into DTD entities, in
> the order in which they appear in the source. However, some are so
> magical that they need to occur before all the others. These
> are flagged with @predeclare=true
>
> why, you ask, can't the ODD processor sort this out for itself?
>
> cos. just cos.

If I understand the situation correctly, this is a case of breaking
cyclical dependencies.

The classic computer science approach is to pre-declare everything,
would that work here? It would increase the size of the DTD and but
remove a level of reasoning and a level of complexity from the ODD.

cheers
stuart