Chris Lilley wrote:

> Heh. What you are saying is, have some sort of switch in the document
> which says whether the document is asserted to be valid or whether it is
> just well formed?
> 
> But that of course already exists, and people can choose to make just
> well-formed documents if they want.

What switch is that?

This document

  <doc>foo</doc>

is well-formed but not valid.  This document also is well-formed but not
valid:

<!DOCTYPE doc [
<!ATTLIST doc a CDATA "default">
]>
<doc>foo</doc>

Neither contains an assertion that is valid.  Systems that assume that a
document is meant to be valid merely because it contains a DOCTYPE
declaration are broken; there's nothing in the XML spec that licenses
such an assumption.

> > The inclusion of a DTD could be interpreted as switch indicating to
> > the interpreter that structural integrity check has to be done on the
> > document.
> 
> Not "could be"; *is&*. That is the intent of the XML 1.0 spec.

That's news to me.

> That is
> what a validating parser does when encountering a document with a
> doctype declaration and an internal subset with anything other than just
> entity declarations.

So what is this switch?  The DOCTYPE declaration? The DOCTYPE
declaration unless it's just an internal subset containing entity
declarations?  What if I have default attributes declared as well? What
if I have so many entities that I use an external subset instead?  Where
does the XML spec mention such a switch?

I know Microsoft-bashing is good, clean fun, but actually they've done
the right thing here.

James


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