Re: Comments on XPP draft o2 24 January 2013

At its recent f2f, the XProc WG renewed its efforts to address the
concerns you raised in August with respect to our January draft [1]

This is the first of what I hope will be a steady flow of responses.

To start with a short and, I hope, easy one, you write:

  4.4 Definitions

  The spec appears still to lack definitions for key terms, including
  most prominently profile and processing (specifically processing of
  declarations).

  This means that the issues originally raised as issue 4 and issue 7
  in the review of April 2011 remain unresolved. If the WG's belief is
  that the reference to the XML spec suffices as a gloss of the words
  "reading and processing all external markup declarations", then I
  regret to inform you that this reader does not find any useful
  distinction between reading and processing in that document. What in
  the world do you think these words mean?

The phrase you mention, "reading and processing all external markup
declarations", is based on the second paragraph of the Entity Declared
Well-formedness constraint [2] in the XML spec.

  Note that non-validating processors are not obligated to _read and
  process_ entity declarations occurring in parameter entities or in
  the external subset; for such documents, the rule that an entity
  must be declared is a well-formedness constraint only if
  standalone='yes'. [emphasis added]

The "read and process" phrase appears again in section 5.1 [3], where
the possibility of reading but _not_ processing is further described.

The Processor Profiles spec. uses this phrase in the context of a
discussion of DTD validation, where it seemed useful to us to
emphasise that the XML spec. requires complete reading _and_
processing when validating, and so we did think that we could use the
phrase without further explanation.

Now that I've pointed to the precedent in the XML spec., do you think
we can leave this alone, or should we add a reference to 5.1?

Thanks,

ht

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-xml-proc-profiles-20120124/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#wf-entdeclared
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#proc-types
-- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
                Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
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Received on Wednesday, 16 October 2013 14:29:34 UTC