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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Internal entities removed from XML?
 Mike, We have a bug which caused the behavior Doug Ransom saw. Please do not treat a bug in one of our implementations of an XML parser as indicative of any imagined Microsoft position towards the W3C XML 1.0 recommendation. -----Original Message----- From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@x...] Sent: Thu 12/19/2002 5:59 AM To: xml-dev@l... Cc: Subject: Re: Internal entities removed from XML? On 19 Dec 2002 11:57:50 +0100, Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...> wrote: > > To quote John Cowan [1], the golden rule for interoperability is "Be > liberal in what you accept, conservative in what you send" and I had > always understood > Common XML as a set of conservative rules to be used for what you send > if you want to avoid any interoperability trouble. > > Using it the other way round to be conservative in what you accept would > on the contrary bring you a lot of troubles would be a disaster IMO ! That certainly is a good point. I may be so infatuated with the idea that the Powers that Be have independently discovered the principles that we carved out here about three years ago during the great SML permathread that I'm blinded to the problems with implementing them at the API level rather than in standard profiles. Whatever ... my interest here is not in advocating that the industry adopt the MS approach to the problem, just in pointing out that the question of profiling is Out There and has to be dealt with. MS may be dealing with it badly (I really don't know enough about what they actually do in the .NET API to have an informed opinion), but the appear to be dealing with it. "Standards" (especially industry consortium specs as opposed to de jure standards) that deviate from actual practice become irrelevant. The actual practice of a lot of the data-oriented integration-driven XML applications seems to implicitly deprecate much of what is in the XML specs. If MS is optimizing their software and setting their defaults for the common case rather than the full spec, that is a *symptom* of something that needs to be addressed, IMHO. Some seem to want to address it by evangelizing the importance of supporting and exploiting the whole spec, some want to address it by accomodating the specs to the reality that many have voted with their feet against big chunks of the XML Recommendation. (To be clear, I'm talking about "legalizing" one or more profiles, a la the XML-SW proposal, not formally deprecating DTDs ... that is obviously not the right thing for a big chunk of the XML users out there!). So, in my idealized vision of the future, things like the SOAP profile (XML 1.x - DTDs + namespaces + [xml:id? some simple xsi types?]) could be the advertised dialect that a producer produces and a consumer consumes. Sure, that has downsides ... my basic point is that those downsides are out there right now. For example,a message that validates against the SOAP schema SHOULD (or MUST, can't remember offhand) be rejected by SOAP processor if it contains a DTD internal subset or PIs. [Whether this is a Good Thing or not has been beaten to death on xml-dist-app and www-tag, let's not go there.] In that situation, "be liberal in what you accept" *degrades* interoperability just like it does when alleged "XML" processors accept something that is ill-formed. I just think that a situation where there was some standardized way for an XML processor to be told what dialect to expect, and what to do if the constraints of that dialect are violated, would put us in a better situation than we are now. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl> 
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