Re: C.16 Behavior when DTD is incomplete?

At 1:35 PM 10/17/96, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>On 23 October 1996, the ERB will vote to decide the following
>question.  A straw poll indicates the ERB is leaning to not
>prescribing any particular behavior.
>
>C.16 When given an incomplete DTD, should XML parsers assume all
>attributes are implicity declared CDATA, or should some attribute
>names cause other assumptions (e.g. attributes with the same name as
>some type of declared value might be assumed to have that declared
>value)?


Implicit CDATA. There's no benefit in leaving this undefined, and being
smart about it will just make worse trouble. Of course, "id" will already
be a fixed, undeclared, universally accessible attribute anyway; so the
"smartness" doesn't get you much.

   Anyway, even if we make the mistake of cluttering XML with NMTOKEN and
its ilk, the parser must assume CDATA absent a declaration. Otherwise we
will be annoying the user with errors (they may not be able to get rid of)
to the effect that "you meant this to be an NMTOKEN, and it's not".

   That's the kind of error message that makes me give my monitor the finger.

   -- David

RE delenda est.

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Received on Thursday, 17 October 1996 22:49:33 UTC