Re: issue with relative URIs in the DOM

After a little reflection, it seems that DOM isn't the only technology that may discard
the information necessary to resolve relative URI's in entity references.  XSLT is
required to present a document object model that has entity references expanded.
That would  make it impossible for an XSLT transform to correctly absolutize URI's or
generate xml:base attributes in documents that had external entities that
had different base URI's (until something like the resolve function suggested in
features under consideration is available).

I agree that the scoping rule is the best approach, what I would recommend
is some text in the body that acknowledges that other XML technologies
may expand entity references and to suggest that document authors
provide, when possible, an equivalent xml:base attribute in the containing
element so that entity reference expanding processors get the same absolute URI.

The xml:base in the following example would only come into play in
an entity expanding processor, but would result in URI references
in the entity to be uniformly interpreted.


<!DOCTYPE ...[
<!ENTITY xmlconf SYSTEM 'xmlconf/xmlconf.xml'>
]>
<TESTSUITE>
<TESTCASES xml:base="xmlconf/">
    &xmlconf;
</TESTCASES>
</TESTSUITE>

Received on Monday, 17 July 2000 12:31:28 UTC