Re: Options for dealing with IDs

At 4:00 AM +1100 1/17/03, Rick Jelliffe wrote:

>Now by "what infoset a parser will produce" I don't mean minor things like
>the status of CDATA sections, but very major things: whether an attribute
>is present, and (most significantly for downstream processing) whether that
>attribute provides a namespace.
>
>Which is why I think we need to move to four kinds of XML documents
>and processors

Yes, this is a problem, but I think you're making it worse, not 
better. In particular, you need to clearly separate XML documents and 
XML processors, and not talk about them in the same sentence like 
this, because the real solution requires almost exactly opposite 
behaviors from documents and processors.

For maximum interoperability, an XML document should not have an 
external DTD subset. This guarantees that all conformant processors 
will produce the same infoset.

For maximum interoperability, an XML processor should read the 
external DTD subset if one appears. This guarantees that it will get 
the document's full and complete infoset.

I just don't see any need for a processor that gives up when it sees 
a document type declaration. I don't see the need for a processor 
that can't even process the internal DTD subset. And I don't think we 
should bless such processors.

Yes, the situation is confused now. Adding an additional level of 
conformance for processors makes the situation worse, not better.


>     - headless (e.g. for SOAP, similar to Norm's suggestion)
>     - well-formed (deprecated)
>     - infoset-complete but unvalidated (e.g. for XHTML)
>     - valid

I see your point here, but I don't like your usage of the word 
"well-formed" to identify only a subset of well-formed documents. In 
fact all four of the above cases are well-formed. perhaps  that case 
could be identified as standalone="no"..
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|           Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava             |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

Received on Thursday, 16 January 2003 16:30:31 UTC