End-of-Line Handling clarification

  All,

I am hoping someone can provide a bit of clarification on section 2.11
(End-of-Line Handling) in REC-xml: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/

This section states:

    "To simplify the tasks of applications
    <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#dt-app>, the XML processor
    <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#dt-xml-proc> /MUST/ behave as if it
    normalized all line breaks in external parsed entities (including
    the document entity) on input, before parsing, by translating both
    the two-character sequence #xD #xA and any #xD that is not followed
    by #xA to a single #xA character."

where the "application" is defined:

    It is assumed that an XML processor is doing its work on behalf of
    another module, called the *application*.


It is unclear how the "application - XML processor" relationship can
be applied to the client server model, where a server and client are
only communicating with well-formed XML documents.  In this model, it
is possible that the recipient of an XML document is interpreted as
the "application" and the sender acts as the "XML processor".  Another
interpretation is for the server and the client to be both application
and XML processor.

Our scenario is this:  A server has responded to a client application
with an XML message (over HTTP) that contains sequences of '\r\n'
characters intended to signify an end-of-line.  Should this XML
document be considered well-formed even though it contains '\r\n'
characters?  More specifically, does the client application need to
pre-process the XML document and convert all '\r\n' characters to '\n'?

Thanks in advance.

- Michael Siegel
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Received on Tuesday, 4 April 2006 10:03:52 UTC