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Re: Article: "The horror of XML"

• To: "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <elharo@m...>,"xml-dev" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Article: "The horror of XML"
• From: "Seairth Jacobs" <seairth@s...>
• Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 11:20:33 -0500
• References: <4c.14269086.2af14649@a...> <002601c28028$c029b080$a800a8c0@SeairthA31> <p04330107b9e5afc85b06@[192.168.254.4]>

From: "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <elharo@m...>
>
> At 10:26 AM -0500 10/30/02, Seairth Jacobs wrote:
>
> >2) I see no problem with having a parser that ignores portions of XML
spec
> >if it will never encounter those portions, such as DTDs or PIs (CDATA in
his
> >example).  He claims this would cause interoperability issues.  Where and
> >How?
>
> It depends on what you mean by "ignore". If they simply don't report
> them to the client app that's one thing. However, they are absolutely
> required to read processing instructions and the document type
> declaration and report any well-formedness errors in these
> constructs. A parser that does not do this is not an XML parser.  I
> have seen more than one parser vendor try to leave this required
> functionality out of their toolkit.
>
> With regard to the internal DTD subset, it goes a little further.
> Even at the minimum conformance level, parsers are required to apply
> default attribute values and expand internal entity references
> declared in the internal DTD subset, at least up to the first
> external entity they don't resolve. Parsers that don't do this can
> cause real interoperability problems.

But all that presuposes that the parser will be encountering these parts of
XML.  As I mentioned, if the parser will never encounter a particular part
of XML, then it should be okay to leave that code out.  For instance, if a
parser handles only "standalone" documents, why should it need code to handl
DTDs?  I absolutely agree that a parser should not ignore parts of the XML
spec that it will encounter, but that is not what I said above.

---
Seairth Jacobs
seairth@s...

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