Re: Apparent bug in SVG DTD

Hi Peter,

On Jan 2, 2009, at 01:07 , Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> There seems to be a bug in an SVG DTD; the document
>
>         <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
>         <!DOCTYPE svg SYSTEM
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/03/WD-SVG-20000303/DTD/svg-20000303-stylable.dtd 
> ">
>         <svg/>
>
> throws an error in at least two parsers (XOM, layered on Xerces) and  
> libxml
>
> see http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/xom-interest/2009-January/003801.html 
>  and previous discussion in that thread
>
> In contrast the document
>
>         <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
>         <!DOCTYPE svg SYSTEM
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-SVG-20010904/DTD/svg10.dtd">
>         <svg/>
>
> parses satisfactorily.

As you can no doubt infer from the dates and acronyms in those URIs,  
the first DTD is from a draft and woefully out of date at that (in  
fact the second isn't the latest version either, and even if it were  
the usage of DTDs is deprecated for SVG).

> The error is apparently related to the parameter entity describing  
> the namespace for SVG.

I'll further note that this namespace was itself defined as temporary  
and experimental, corresponds to a state of affairs long forgotten by  
most, and more importantly isn't the SVG namespace.

> My current problem is that pstoedit uses this DTD for all its output  
> files and therefore all of them crash.

That is very clearly a bug in pstoedit. I can't speak on behalf of the  
WG but I think that retroactively fixing a draft is probably a bad  
idea: drafts have mistakes, that's why they're drafts. A better fix  
would be to have pstoedit stop including any kind of DTD.

> [In passing let me say how much I support SVG. Not only do I use it  
> for graphics output (wherever I can assume the recipient can render  
> it), but it also acts as a very good data model for converting less  
> pleasant graphics formats into structured form.]

That's always nice to hear.

Happy new year!

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/
     Feel like hiring me? Go to http://robineko.com/

Received on Saturday, 3 January 2009 13:55:47 UTC