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RE: The subsetting has begun

• To: "Cavnar-Johnson, John" <JCavnar-Johnson@s...>,xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: The subsetting has begun
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 11:06:11 -0500
• In-reply-to: <006301c2d9bd$15427b40$6401a8c0@cavnarjohnson>
• References: <006301c2d9bd$15427b40$6401a8c0@cavnarjohnson>

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/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

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