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dereferencing DTDs, was: Note from the Troll

• To: <tblanchard@m...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: dereferencing DTDs, was: Note from the Troll
• From: "Julian Reschke" <julian.reschke@g...>
• Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2002 13:41:53 +0100
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <36C08A70-E9A2-11D6-9F26-0030657E2F34@m...>

> From: tblanchard@m... [mailto:tblanchard@m...]
> Sent: Sunday, October 27, 2002 12:50 PM
> To: xml-dev@l...
> Subject:  Note from the Troll
>

(lots of stuff deleted)

> 3) The weight of the processing model is really really heavy.  As an
> example, using URLs to reference DTD's causes all sorts of problems for
> computers when they're off the network.  XML  parsing simply halts.

(Or for that matter, they fail because the remote site is down or lost the
DTD. Happened before, will happen again).

> This is especially annoying when running something like BEA WebLogic on
> your machine because you're doing a web app.  BEA stores config info in
> XML which references some DTD at BEA and the server simply won't start
> if that server isn't available.  You can argue this is a misuse of XML
> - I think so - but its one of those things thats going to hurt people's
> impressions of XML.

Yes. Don't do that. Either do not validate at all, or validate against a
local copy. This is common sense. I'm surprised how frequently people make
this mistake.

BTW: it's not XML's fault. URLs *identify* a DTD for the document. Nobody
says that you must actually retrieve it. Imagine every browser would GET a
document from www.w3.org to parse an HTML document.

> ..

--
<green/>bytes GmbH -- http://www.greenbytes.de -- tel:+492512807760

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