RE: XML 1.0 and XML 1.1

Hi Paul,

One person's enhancement request is another persons bug report.
Clearly external entities were created to allow XML content to be 
decomposed into external components that could be included by reference. 
My report showed that this intent is hobbled by the inability of external 
components to declare the existence of external components.  The inclusion 
mechanism works to arbitrary depth, so why doesn't the corresponding 
declaration mechanism?  Since the purpose of external entities is to 
provide decomposition of XML content, and the external entity itself is 
*defined* in terms of XML content, this is a language bug.  My report also 
showed how to fix the language bug.

I agree that fixing it in XML 1.0 appears... daunting.  I could understand 
a response which says the W3C doesn't intend to do further versions of 
XML, nor does it intend to continue refining XML 1.0.  But the form of 
that response just got more interesting now that you have proposed 
backporting international characters into NameChar.  That's an enhancement 
request, which you said you weren't entertaining.  But if the working 
group has changed it's mind about enhancements/bug fixes, then perhaps 
this other fix could be considered while you're in the neighborhood. 

Thanks,
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM: Lotus Forms Architect and Researcher
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer





"Grosso, Paul" <pgrosso@ptc.com> 
10/30/2007 10:25 AM

To
"Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, John Boyer/CanWest/IBM@IBMCA
cc
<public-xml-core-wg@w3.org>
Subject
RE: XML 1.0 and XML 1.1






 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Henry S. Thompson [mailto:ht@inf.ed.ac.uk] 
> Sent: Tuesday, 2007 October 30 12:14
> To: John Boyer
> Cc: Grosso, Paul; chairs@w3.org; chairs-request@w3.org
> Subject: Re: XML 1.0 and XML 1.1
> 
> John Boyer writes:
> 
> > I noticed that I got no response to a note I sent a few weeks ago
> > about a design flaw in XML related to entity references being usable
> > in external parsed entities, but entities not being definable in
> > external parsed entities (which breaks the intent of entities to
> > allow componentized XML content).
> 
> Oops -- I think the WG just missed your post -- I'll chase this up.

We didn't miss it exactly.  I saw it--it's at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-editor/2007OctDec/0000
but we haven't been dealing with XML errata lately.

Besides, this is more of an enhancement request than
an erratum, and we aren't really entertaining 
enhancement requests for XML at this time, so I'm
not sure how we'd deal with something like this.

But we can discuss this within the WG.

paul