[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: We need SAX features to say a parser supports XML
>Normally, of course, committees try to use the easiest method >and will say "of course, what we *meant* to say was ...". > >In the W3C world there is nothing in between an erratum >and a version up, so errata can be expected to also contain >corrections relating to exigencies. > >This is a procedural issue: you buy into an organization's technology, >and you may also have to live with their procedures too. > The W3C Process document states: W3C may publish a revised version of a Recommendation to make minor clarifications, error corrections, or editorial repairs, without following the Recommendation track. The status section of an editorial revision must indicate its relationship to previous versions (e.g., that it supersedes previous versions). The Team must notify the Members when an editorial revision of a Recommendation is published. If more substantial revisions to a Recommendation are necessary, a Working Group must follow the Recommendation process to produce the revision. The status section of any Recommendation must indicate its relationship to previous related Recommendations (e.g., an indication that a Recommendation supersedes, obsoletes, or subsumes another, etc.). This is a bit wishy-washy about what an "error correction" is. I tend to think, though, that there's no error in the version in the BNF grammar in XML 1.0 or the namespace URI for the xmlns prefix. In these cases, the original working group possibly didn't make the best decision, but it wasn't in error. They made a clear and consistent choice. They knew what they were doing. They decided that reporting version strings other than 1.0 as an error was optional, and that's what they wrote in the spec. They didn't have a slip of the keyboard. Ditto for the namespace URI of the xmlns prefix. The problem is that the W3C is not following its own advertised process. They are making substantial revisions to recommendations without following the Recommendation process. In so doing it's no surprise that they are imposing major costs on implementers, users, documenters, and other spec clients without even giving them an opportunity to comment before hand. The namespace issues were in direct conflict with the established behavior of SAX 2. The version issue will cause problems for some parsers, all test suites, and possibly some end user programs. There are other problems. E2 adds a validity constraint, though arguably this was always implied by SGML. E41 adds an additional legal value for xml:lang attribute, though most parsers won't have checked this. Here, however, it's entirely possible that client apps were relying on the old legal values. E36 allows more documents to be standalone="no" than could be previously. E10 is huge. It adds a new one of those annoying error conditions that parsers may or may not report in the event that an unknown entity is found in an attribute value by a non-validating parser. (Why skipped entities in attribute values should be treated differently than skipped entities in PCDATA, I'm not sure but there's probably a reason.) All of this is happening without notice or feedback. We don't know how serious the breakage is because mostly this gets slipstreamed in before anyone notices. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/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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