Re: On Henry's comment about documents with DOCTYPE but without markup declaration

Just some clarifications at this point.

Paul Grosso writes:

> I don't understand or particularly like the idea of introducing
> the term "invalid".  I gather from what Henry says above that
> he is using the term to mean "not well-formed" (or just not XML)
> when he says that a well-formed (but not valid) document is
> neither valid nor invalid.

What I meant to claim, wrt the examples cited, was that documents
without a document type declaration _cannot_ be valid, or invalid,
because the definition of validity depends on _having_ a document type
declaration.

But part of the problem as reported stems from the fact that the
spec. is unclear wrt what a validating processor should report when
presented with a well-formed document which lacks a document type
declaration.

> On the other hand, Henry says that <!DOCTYPE html><html/> is
> "invalid", and then that confuses me, since that is well-formed.

The example was easy to misread, sorry, but not was you quote it,
rather:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<hmtl/>

I should have used
<!DOCTYPE html>
<xyzzy/>


> I don't think the XML spec should dictate when a validating
> parser versus a non-validating parser should be used.  (I'm
> not saying Henry suggests that either; I'm just trying to
> outline what changes we might consider to the spec.)

Agreed.

ht
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       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
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Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2014 11:42:25 UTC