Re: Names beginning with "xml"

On Thu, 2012-08-16 at 17:14 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Liam R E Quin quotavit:
> 
> > This specification does not give meaning to any value of xml:space
> > other than "default" and "preserve". It is an error for other values
> > to be specified; the XML processor may report the error or may
> > recover by ignoring the attribute specification or by reporting the
> > (erroneous) value to the application. Applications may ignore or
> > reject erroneous values.
> 
> And that makes a document with xml:space="funky" well-formed, because
> the only requirements for being a well-formed document are:
> 
>     Taken as a whole, it matches the production labeled document.
> 
>     It meets all the well-formedness constraints given in this
>     specification.
> 
>     Each of the parsed entities which is referenced directly or
>     indirectly within the document is well-formed.
> 
> Since the above quotation is not a well-formedness constraint, violating
> it does not make a document not well-formed.

You have a good point.

It is, however, an error, which may halt processing, preventing the
parser from reporting the document as wf. This is what I meant when I
said it is sloppy: if it is an error it should be marked as a
well-formedness error. If it is not an error the spec should use an
rfc-should, and avoid the word "error".

Possibly worth a WG decision and a potential erratum to clarify whether
a document containing an optionally-recoverable error is to be
considered well-formed even if the parser does not in fact recover from
the error. I have always assumed that reporting an error, in the context
of XML and draconian behaviour, would also mean termination of
processing - that is, that errors are fatal.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Thursday, 16 August 2012 22:03:48 UTC