Processor conformance

Section 8 states:

To conform to this specification, a processor must report violations 
of namespace well-formedness, with the exception that it it not 
required to check that namespace names are legal IRIs.

I would prefer that processors be required to check at least 
syntactical correctness of namespace IRIs. Failing to do so pretty 
much eliminates the point of requiring them to be IRIs. One of the 
really good ideas of XML has been that well-formedness constraints 
must be checked and violations must be reported. I see little reason 
to change that here.

If processors are not required to check this, one of two things will happen:

1. No processors will check it, and the constraint that namespace 
names be IRIs will be effectively negated.

2. Some processors will check this and some won't. This will cause 
interoperability problems.

Both results are bad. It's not that hard to check that a string is a 
legal absolute IRI reference.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/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, 19 December 2002 07:48:04 UTC