[Bug 1921] New: [XQuery] Disallow comments before encoding declaration

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=1921

           Summary: [XQuery] Disallow comments before encoding declaration
           Product: XPath / XQuery / XSLT
           Version: Last Call drafts
          Platform: PC
        OS/Version: Windows XP
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: XQuery
        AssignedTo: chamberl@almaden.ibm.com
        ReportedBy: mike@saxonica.com
         QAContact: public-qt-comments@w3.org


There appears to be nothing in the specification that prevents a comment from
appearing in the middle of, or before, the XQuery version declaration. Since it
is the version declaration that tells the parser what encoding is used, and
since a comment may contain arbitrary characters, this makes life unnecessarily
difficult for a "pre-parser" that is trying to detect the encoding. For example,
one can envisage a multi-byte encoding in which the sequence x3A x29 [ASCII :)]
is present but does not represent the end of a comment.

I propose a rule that if a version declaration is present, then there must be no
comments before or within the version declaration.

Michael Kay

Received on Wednesday, 31 August 2005 13:59:49 UTC