Re: ERB decision, 31 October 1996

At 02:05 AM 11/1/96 GMT, Charles F. Goldfarb wrote:

>>Right.  And we didn't rule that out.  We just said that you don't *have to*
>>read external text entities unless you're validating.
>
>But in SGML they are always accessed and parsed, and the resulting ESIS is
>always the same. (Yes, I know that 8879 doesn't mention ESIS by name, but the
>SGML conformance testing standard certainly does.)

Right.  The reason we can get away with this is that we are not claiming
that an XML processor is always an SGML parser.  When it's *validating*
we want the behavior to be effectively identical to that of an XML
parser, and the spec needs to lock that in.  The behavior described
(not having to read an external text entity) only applies when the
XML processor is *not trying to validate*.  Which is not an 8879-compliant
operation in the first place.

The consensus apparently seemed to be that while XML *can* parse in
the 8879 sense, a Web browser need not and typically does not - and yet 
we'd still like to call it "XML-compliant".  Hence this policy.

Cheers, Tim Bray
tbray@textuality.com http://www.textuality.com/ +1-604-488-1167

Received on Friday, 1 November 1996 01:06:29 UTC