[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Alternative "character entity" proposal

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Alternative "character entity" proposal
• From: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@a...>
• Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 16:19:28 +1000
• In-reply-to: <200310212231.XAA08981@s...>
• References: <200310212231.XAA08981@s...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3.1) Gecko/20030428

Richard Tobin wrote:

>Making undefined entities a validity error in order to allow
>experimentation would reduce interoperability.  I don't really see any
>advantage to it over just doing those experiments with non-conforming
>processors.  You don't need the XML Core Group's permission to do that :-)
>  
>
I have been "experimenting" with non-conforming processors for several 
years:
our products include a backwards parser, reference-ignoring parser 
modes, parsers
that recover from unbalanced tags, and parsers that recover from non-WF XML.

It seems we are at an impasse here: people will not move to non-standard XML
and this is hindering them from fully utilizing tools firther down the 
line (XSLT,
schema languages, XInclude, etc).  But the XML Core WG probably won't
make any changes unless there is a grassroots movement of people who
have adopted some non-standard change.

So I think that Richard is sadly correct here: people who want to use
named character references and get rid of DTDs must implement their
own non-standard systems.  So we should not waste our time with
standards conformance, but just go ahead and do it; if enough of
us implement the same thing, maybe W3C will add it.   If a
standard is an "agreement" that reflects industry practise, I guess
that is the way it has to be.  What should XML-DEVers do? Define some
SAX property to handle this, then get it implemented in the standard
SAX parsers?

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Alternative "character entity" proposal
    • From: james anderson <james.anderson@s...>
  • Re: Alternative "character entity" proposal
    • From: Bob Foster <bob@o...>

• References:
  • Re: Alternative "character entity" proposal
    • From: Richard Tobin <richard@c...>

• Prev by Date: Re: Request for Erratum to XML 1.0 and 1.1 Specs
• Next by Date: RE: Request for Erratum to XML 1.0 and 1.1 Specs
• Previous by thread: Re: Alternative "character entity" proposal
• Next by thread: Re: Alternative "character entity" proposal
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread