Re: Comments on XPP draft o2 24 January 2013

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen writes:

> HST wrote:
>> The phrase you mention, "reading and processing all external markup
>> declarations", is based on the second paragraph of the Entity Declared
>> Well-formedness constraint [2] in the XML spec.
>
> Yes, this is true.
>
> It does not, however, answer the question I had when I read the
> XPP spec and asked in the paragraph quoted above.  The WG's 
> answer appears to amount to "we don't know what they mean, and
> it doesn't matter because the XML spec used them before us without
> explaining what they mean."

I thought it amounted to "they have pretty obvious ordinary-language
meanings, which are assumed/articulated by context a bit throughout
the XML spec. without ever being explicitly defined there, so
referring to that spec. should be sufficient".

> You have a report from one reader (who has also read the XML
> spec) who found the unexplained usage confusing.

Fair enough.  Would it be sufficient to add a note after the 3rd
para. of section 7 (or whereever that ends up after the rewrite that
is coming in response to another of your comments) as follows:

  Note: For the distinction between 'read' and 'process' and how
  processors might do one but not the other, see the definition of
  'process' in the XML specification
  [ref. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#dt-use-mdecl] and the sentence
  immediately following it.

Trying instead of the above to actually reexpress what is referenced
there would, I feel, require huge amounts of technical terminology
from the XML spec to be explained in turn, and would be out of all
proportion to the importance of this sentence.

ht
-- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
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Received on Wednesday, 16 October 2013 21:26:06 UTC