[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View
• From: Richard Tobin <richard@c...>
• Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2002 23:17:18 GMT
• Cc:
• In-reply-to: <BD2DBD26EE0BAA48B1A425C7BE7923002CFF76@c...>
• Organization: HCRC, University of Edinburgh

>Are there any known cases of processing that *depends* on this being
>a WF error (and would thus be surprised if it someday became allowed)?

Well, XSLT and dozens of other applications depend on entities having
been expanded, so in effect they rely on undefined entities being a
well-formedness error (ie the kind of error that stops normal
processing).  At the very least, their behaviour is implementation
dependent if there are undefined entities, whether it's a
well-formedness or validity error.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here.  If undefined entities were
merely a validity error, how would experimentation be more tractable?
And why isn't adding a dummy doctype good enough?

In theory, something like

  <!DOCTYPE foo [<!ENTITY % x ""> %x;]>

is sufficient to make undefined entities a validity error, though
a quick check suggests that not all parsers believe that.

-- Richard

• References:
  • RE: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View
    • From: Micah Dubinko <MDubinko@c...>

• Prev by Date: Re: XML/RDF
• Next by Date: RE: XML/RDF
• Previous by thread: Re: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View
• Next by thread: Re: Character Entities: An XML Core WG View
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread