- From: Bert Bos <bert@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 22:03:52 +0200
- To: <w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org>
From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> > I'm now putting PE reference handling in Lark, and it's turning into > quite a lot of code - since these things are just for DTD's, and Lark > is nonvalidating anyhow, I'm wondering if the extra processing and code > size required are in the spirit of XML, particularly for lightweight > standalone processing. It seems like PE's are largely in the spec to > support authoring-end activities. > > Would it be reasonable to think about saying either that > (a) PErefs should not be used in the internal DTD subset, or > (b) PErefs should not be used in WF docs? There is a better solution, and even more in the spirit of XML: define XML in such a way that no parser ever needs to parse a DTD. That would leave the burden of parsing DTDs (and PEs) to certain generic validators and generators. You don't need many of those, but you do need hundreds of normal parsers. This is not just a wish. I think this is absolutely necessary. Most parsers *will* treat XML as if it didn't need a DTD and it is better for interoperability if there is a spec for that format. Section 2.10 (Required markup declaration) of the latest working draft already outlines the expected problems. That's OK for a draft, but eventually the spec needs to solve them. Bert
Received on Wednesday, 28 May 1997 16:03:05 UTC