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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Debating "civil disobedience" against overlycomplicatedspe
 > -----Original Message----- > From: Evan Lenz [mailto:elenz@x...] > Sent: Monday, September 24, 2001 3:36 PM > To: Sean McGrath; xml-dev@l... > Subject: Re: Debating "civil disobedience" against > overlycomplicatedspecs > > > I was referring to precedents of specification rather than precedents of > implementations' conformance levels. SOAP is the first > specification I've heard of that treats DOCTYPE declarations as errors. Are > there any other specifications that do this? I don't know of any. But that's why I used the term "civil disobedience" to describe what Electric XML does in its non-standard API, and various implementations of other specs seems to be doing quietly: ignoring the stuff in the specs that makes life complicated for ordinary users who don't generally care about notations, unparsed entities, attribute types, namespace complexities, and such. In other words, they're not fighting the "laws" (complex specs) in "Congress" (the W3C), they're simply ignoring the details they don't like. There seem to be two rational ways that the XML community (e.g., the folks on this list) could address this. The obvious one would be to try to shame the implementers into doing the right thing, for example by volunteering to write and perform conformance tests and publicize the results. A corollary would probably be that you should lobby the SOAP WG into allowing PIs and DOCTYPE declarations (and the whole tangled mass of stuff that DTDs bring to the party) in SOAP messages. The other approach would be to lobby the W3C for a clean way to define XML feature profiles that applications could use to specify the contract between producers and consumers of data -- not just the elements, attributes, and values, but the other stuff such as acceptability of DTD internal subsets, CDATA sections, PIs, and various namespace declaration configurations. This would make the SOAP debate easy to resolve: just use whatever magic profile string is required to tell the XML parser to treat DOCTYPE declarations and PIs as errors, then we have interoperability across SOAP implementations and between SOAP and generic XML implementations. Simon St. Laurent, my usual partner in crime, seemed to by arguing against the latter "SGML-ish" approach in an earlier message. He's right that this is out of synch with the XML philosophy of defining one basic syntax that all applications should understand. But actual practice hasn't been kind to this philosophical notion; for whatever reasons -- good or bad, I don't want to re-open the "SML" debate! -- implementers of specialized processors have NOT been quick to support all the features that XML 1.0 defines. The DOM defines various optional modules, and SVG has a requirement to define full/basic/tiny conformance levels in the next version; why not address the specialized simplicity vs generalized interoperability issue once and for all by defining multiple conformance levels in XML itself and letting applications choose the conformance level (or profile) that meets their needs? If it turns out that some conformance level/profile that matches what "developers think the XML specification says" is chosen by most application developers, then the minimalists will be vindicated; if it turns out that real-world application developers want the full power of all the stuff you can define in DTDs, all the "interesting" things you can do with namespaces, all the wonderful stuff that the PSVI lets the people (ahem, all 5 of them <grin>) who understand it do ... then that's fine too. 
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