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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 09:22:42 -0600
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <p04330105ba7be01cdbea@[192.168.254.4]>

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?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...]
> Sent: Friday, February 21, 2003 7:59 AM
> To: Mike Champion; xml-dev@l...
> Subject: Re:  The subsetting has begun
> 
> At 8:40 AM -0500 2/21/03, Mike Champion wrote:
> 
> 
> >Anyone following sml-dev three years ago would not be surprised to
> >hear that vendors are subsetting XML for mobile, data-oriented
> >applications.  Where's the "sin" here?  What's a cellphone supposed
> >to do with an external entity reference, or a notation declaration?
> >Should well-known interoperability antipatterns such as default
> >attribute values be encouraged in lightweight applications?
> 
> The sin is in forbidding the document type declaration. If they
> choose not to load any external entities, then that's blessed by XML.
> However, this does not give them freedom to reject documents that
> contain such things, or to drop out lexical features of XML such as
> default attribute values and internal entities declared in the
> internal DTD subset.
> 
> I suspect part of the problem is that the members of the expert group
> did not have a clear understanding of the difference between
> validation and reading the DTD, between the DTD and the document type
> declaration, and between the internal and external DTD subsets.
> 
> These are common areas of confusion for a lot of developers. However,
> if you're going to write specs, you need to understand such matters
> better than the average developer.
> --
> 
> +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
> | 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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• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: The subsetting has begun
    • From: Bill de hÓra <bill@d...>
  • RE: The subsetting has begun
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>

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

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