Re: Entity references in Attr values

At 2:24 PM +0100 12/18/01, Dieter Köhler wrote:
>>  I can't find anything in the XML 1.0 spec that's clearly on point
>>  here.
>
>See XML 1.0, 2nd ed., § 5.2:
>"The behavior of a validating XML processor is highly predictable; 
>it must read
>every piece of a document and report all well-formedness and validity
>violations. [...] For maximum reliability in interoperating between different
>XML processors, applications which use non-validating processors 
>should not rely
>on any behaviors not required of such processors. Applications which require
>facilities such as the use of default attributes or internal 
>entities which are
>declared in external entities should use validating XML processors."
>

But that still doesn't say what happens when the recommendation is 
ignored and a validating processor is not used.


>"This property is not strictly speaking part of the infoset of the document.
>Rather it is an indication of whether the processor has read the complete DTD.
>Its value is a boolean. If it is false, then certain properties (indicated in
>their descriptions below) may be unknown. If it is true, those properties are
>never unknown."
>
>So until the entity value of the &link; reference in your example is 
>unknown the
>[normalized value] property of the corresponding Attribute Information Item is
>unknown, too.
>

That's believable. In the Infoset in this case the normalized value 
is simply unknown. That still doesn't answer the question of what DOM 
implementations should return here, though. Null perhaps?
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
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|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/   |
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Received on Tuesday, 18 December 2001 09:53:18 UTC