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Re: Article: "The horror of XML"

• To: "Seairth Jacobs" <seairth@s...>, <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Article: "The horror of XML"
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 10:53:01 -0500
• In-reply-to: <002601c28028$c029b080$a800a8c0@SeairthA31>
• References: <4c.14269086.2af14649@a...><002601c28028$c029b080$a800a8c0@SeairthA31>

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.
-- 

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

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Article: "The horror of XML"
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>
  • Re: Article: "The horror of XML"
    • From: "Seairth Jacobs" <seairth@s...>

• References:
  • Article: "The horror of XML". :)
    • From: AndrewWatt2000@a...
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    • From: "Seairth Jacobs" <seairth@s...>

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