> Being able to serve up directly to the
> browser was the fulfillment of the promise for so long.

Indeed. Congratulations on getting it out there!

Your example does raises a question in my mind, however, but part of
the problem may be a misunderstanding on my part!

> Finally, I must admit to some sloppiness. I used the
> EAD1.0 dtd with beta documents

In this case, I'm a bit confused as to what is going on here.

In my experience of using the beta test version of IE5, if one
pointed an XML document at a DTD (which isn't mandatory in XML - you
can send a "well-formed" doc with no DOCTYPE statement and therefore
no DTD) then the XML parser in IE5 validated the document against the
DTD and produced an error message if it failed to validate. i.e. it
didn't get as far as producing the "built-in stylesheet" display
which you describe.

Now then, in your case, there is a DOCTYPE and a DTD, but we know
that the (EAD beta conforming) document is _invalid_ as far as the
supplied (version 1.0) DTD is concerned (e.g. the document contains a
<FINDAID> element, and there is markup in a mixture of upper and
lower case - XML is case-sensitive.)

So I rather expected IE5 (I'm now using the new release 5.0 proper)
to choke... but no! I've just tried it and up comes the built-in
styled display with no validation errors.

This implies to me that IE5 is not validating the document against
the DTD... which firstly suggests that the document could equally
well be sent as a well-formed document (without DOCTYPE etc)

But the real question which occurs to me, I suppose, is_why_ IE5 is
not validating and I can't see the answer to that immediately.

Am I wrong in expecting IE5 to look for the DTD and then validate
the document on the client side? I've got used to seeing IE5 validate
but that has been primarily with documents from my local disk and
this has set me wondering whether I have ever seen it validate a
document from a remote server.

Cheers

Pete
====================================================
Pete Johnston (Effective Records Management Project)
Archives & Business Records Centre
University of Glasgow
77-87 Dumbarton Road
Glasgow G11 6PW E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Scotland, U.K. URL: http://www.gla.ac.uk/InfoStrat/ERM/

Tel: (UK) 0141 339 8855 ext. 2166 or (UK) 0141-330-4159
Fax: (UK) 0141-330-4158