Re: RDFa RFE: No Mandated DOCTYPE

On Dec 3, 2007 4:01 PM, Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com> wrote:

> I do not believe it will be mandatory

Why would it not be mandatory?

> Forgive my ignorance, but don't these "off the shelf" tools permit
> access to the DOCTYPE declaration?

Sadly not. XSLT, XPath, and XQuery don't:

* http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/N2281.html#d4029e49
* http://cafeconleche.org/XOM/xpath.xhtml
* http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/

And SAX 1.0 doesn't...

http://mailman.ic.ac.uk/pipermail/xml-dev/1999-December/017484.html

SAX 2.0 does have an event for it, but I read somewhere that SAX
parsers aren't required to fire such an event, and it looks like even
if they do then they might not pass along the Public/System IDs.
Python, for example:

"This interface specifies only those DTD events required for basic
parsing (unparsed entities and attributes)."
- http://docs.python.org/lib/module-xml.sax.handler.html

So that's pretty much all of the tools that I use out of the window,
except for the DOM which does support it. But the DOM doesn't stream,
and I don't think that the PullDOM supports DTD events...

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/