What is the point of root-container

System

I was having difficulty getting some FormAPI to work consistently in two templates that I thought were pretty similar. After a little poking around, I discovered that one of the templates was validating against the datacapture5.0.dtd and did not have a root-container element. The other was validating against the datacapture6.0.dtd and did have a root-container. I see that the 6.0 dtd no longer allows items to appear directly within a ruleset but requires a root-container.

The questions this prompts is: what's the point of root-container? My plan is to make all the templates conform to the 6.0 DTD, add a root-container, and make it's name and location both "root". The previous developer used a different value for name and location for each template. That makes it impossible to use one common formapi file. Is there any reason that my plan is unsound? Pages 38-39 of the 6.0 templating dev manual aren't helping me out here.

I don't really see the value of root-container either. Why did they choose to require it rather than just letting a developer put an or container with a min and max of 1 at the root level if they so chose?

Frederik

hehe, sorry to dig up this thread from the grave, but I couldn't really find a solution to this question...

My angle is this... in datacapture6.0.dtd, the root-container is "mandatory". But if I try to rework my teamsite 5.5.2 DCTs (DTD datacapture5.0.dtd) to be compliant to datacapture6.0.dtd, then this root-container will end up adding a root 'item' element to my DCRs. Consequently, existing DCRs can't be read/written with the reworked DCT without first adding the root-container to them in a conversion effort.

OTOH, I've noticed that I can write DCTs that use datacapture6.0.dtd, without actually having any root-container. Still, I can write things like container with min/max attributes and it works.

So... should I just forget the whole root-container thing?

--Fred