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SAX, non-validating parsers, and external parsed entity references

• From: John Cowan <cowan@l...>
• To: XML Dev <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1998 16:48:13 -0400

There seems to be no way for a SAX-compliant parser that does
*not* expand external parsed entity references (as explicitly
permitted in clause 5.1, to report that it has encountered one.
Thus, given an resource with the URI "foo" whose content is
"<TEST/>", and a document as follows:

<!DOCTYPE MAIN [
	<!ENTITY FOO SYSTEM "foo">
	]>
<MAIN>
	This document is a &foo;
</MAIN>

a conformant parser may return either of the following event streams:

	startDocument(); startElement("MAIN");
	characters("\tThis document is a ");
	startElement("TEST"); endElement("TEST");
	characters("\n"); endElement("MAIN"); endDocument();

or

	startDocument(); startElement("MAIN");
	characters("\tThis document is a ");
	characters("\n"); endElement("MAIN"); endDocument();

Parsers of the first kind cannot even report that they have left
something out!  This seems to me to be a substantial deficiency
in SAX.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan@c...
	You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
	You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
		Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)

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