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At 1:56 PM -0500 3/5/02, Daniel Veillard wrote: > Well that sequence of bytes may actually become a set of sequences >as soon as one is dealing with external entities. A good point. The way the spec is written though I think it's consistent to claim that the document is only the byte/character sequence that references the external entities. It does not actually include the merged text of the entities. The spec also states that: [Definition: A textual object is a well-formed XML document if:] 1. Taken as a whole, it matches the production labeled document. 2. It meets all the well-formedness constraints given in this specification. 3. Each of the parsed entities which is referenced directly or indirectly within the document is well-formed. Point 3 in particular indicates that the entities are not part of the document, even though the parser may treat them as if they were. > Still the Jabber case is an interesting example in my opinion because >they stretch the usual principle of keeping instances "atomic" and instead >agree to work on a long lived "never ending" document. And in such use >case entities doesn't work (because there isn't even a DOCTYPE at the >start of the connection), while XInclude does (assuming the parser handle >them of course), it's intersing to see various specification taken from >a Jabber view point, a lot of them actually requires a full document >instance and won't work directly in such a context. > Another good point. However, the BNF grammar and well-formedness constraints make it clear that an infinite sequence cannot possibly be a well-formed XML document. Thus my definition of data object should be revised to say "either a finite sequence of bytes or a finite sequence of Unicode characters". I don't know if a Jabber document is truly infinite or just indefinitely large. (Looking at the spec I think it's just indefinite.) -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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