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RE: The subsetting has begun

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: The subsetting has begun
• From: "Cavnar-Johnson, John" <JCavnar-Johnson@s...>
• Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 14:11:25 -0600
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <p04330107ba7bfa6809ad@[192.168.254.4]>

Ah, OK. I read this a little closer and it does claim to be the XML
parser spec for J2ME.  This is generally a bad idea, because they
explicit require you not to handle things appropriately.  I think I
could tolerate it (given the platform) if it said "don't expect parsers
on these devices to handle these features", but they really seem to be
requiring positive non-conformant behavior. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...]
> Sent: Friday, February 21, 2003 10:06 AM
> To: Cavnar-Johnson, John; xml-dev@l...
> Subject: RE:  The subsetting has begun
> 
> At 9:22 AM -0600 2/21/03, Cavnar-Johnson, John wrote:
> >I have followed the discussion on the TAG list and here, and I still
> >fail to see what gets people upset about this.  This specification
> >defines a particular application of XML and the style of document
that
> >that application uses. As long as it doesn't purport to define a
> >generalized XML parser, why is it wrong? This application won't
accept
> >all well-formed XML documents, but so what? Must every application
that
> >uses XML accept any XML document?  That just doesn't make sense to
me.
> >What's the danger here?
> >
> 
> It does purport to be a general XML processor for J2ME. It defines
> the Java API for XML Processing for J2ME. That's the problem. If they
> just called this a SOAP parser and never mentioned XML I probably
> wouldn't have a problem with it.
> 
> However, what they are doing, essentially says that you cannot ship a
> non-validating parser on J2ME that actually conforms to XML and SAX.
> They have redefined the behavior of SAX parsers in the J2ME
> environment. They use the same classes we use every day for XML
> processing (e.g. XMLReader and ContentHandler) but they make them
> work differently.
> 
> If this goes through in its current state, it makes it impossible to
> correctly process XML using the standard SAX API and a non-validating
> parser in J2ME. I agree that a parser in this environment probably
> won't want to validate. It may not want to resolve external entities.
> But it certainly should process the internal DTD subset and allow
> doctype declarations.
> 
> Here's one use-case: XHTML. Conformant XHTML *requires* a DOCTYPE
> declaration. It almost never requires actually reading the DTD or
> validating, and most browsers don't. As written, this spec cannot
> adequately support XHTML in the J2ME environment. A J2ME SAX parser
> will throw a SAXParseException on every conformant XHTML document, or
> it will perform a costly and unnecessary validation on every XHTML
> document.
> --
> 
> +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
> | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
> +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
> |           Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)          |
> |              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava             |
> | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA  |
> +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
> |  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
> |  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
> +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

• References:
  • RE: The subsetting has begun
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>

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