Re: A note to implementors about entities in external instance data

On Fri, 27 Oct 2006 13:30:31 +0200, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:

> On Oct 13, 2006, at 15:32, Steven Pemberton wrote:
>
>> Seeing the following:
>> 	http://www.w3.org/2002/04/xml_bugs/#bug4
>
> The document is clearly referring to Gecko's behavior without naming  
> names.

Not necessarily. That document was documenting common bugs in XML parsers,  
possibly due to misreading of the spec. I have seen the bugs in more than  
just Gecko. In fact in my cases, Gecko did it right (because it did  
something special with the namespace).

> But then, it is not reasonable to rely on DTDs on the Web, so this  
> slight misfeature in Gecko is useful in discouraging the use of DTDs.

I think it is orthogonal to the use or not of DTDs. For instance, in my  
case I wanted to process documents that included (character) entities.  
Non-validating XML parsers are not allowed to declare those as  
non-wellformed just because they use externally-defined entities. I was  
unable to process those documents in some systems because the XML parser  
was incorrectly failing to parse them.

Steven

Received on Friday, 27 October 2006 12:54:44 UTC