Re: [xml-dev] The subsetting has begun

elharo@metalab.unc.edu (Elliotte Rusty Harold) writes:
>Sun's recently posted an alpha of J2ME Web Services 
><http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr172/index.html> 
>This spec defines a subset of JAXP, SAX, and XML which is only 
>suitable for processing SOAP messages. It is not suitable for generic 
>XML processing. Among other sins, it permits parsers to throw a 
>SAXParseException when encountering a document type declaration, and 
>to not support non-predefined entity references.

I'm annoyed that they call their subset XML processing, but the actual
work doesn't sound all that different from the TAM work I did for J2ME
last summer:
http://simonstl.com/projects/tam/

TAM passes the DOCTYPE to the application rather than throwing an
exception, but it doesn't process it.  That's why it's the "Tiny API for
Markup", not the "Tiny API for XML".  TAX would be a nice acronym,
though.

>Note that although the spec is focused on web services, it does 
>define an official XML API for J2ME that will be used for parsing 
>documents other than SOAP messages. In other words, SOAP's decision 
>to forbid the internal DTD subset is now being propagated into other 
>domains. Fortunately the JSR-172 subset still allows processing 
>instructions.

TAM also preserved PIs.  They took less work (and space) than DOCTYPE
handling.

>I did not recognize any of the names in the expert group. It is not 
>clear if there is any real XML expert in the group who actually 
>understands XML at a deep level. However, if passed unfixed this spec 
>and resulting implementations will be seen as normative by numerous 
>other programmers who don't read W3C recommendations or hang out on 
>xml-dev.

If they call it XML, I'll be disappointed.  On the other hand, I don't
think what they're doing is irrational outside of an XML 1.0 context.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org

Received on Friday, 21 February 2003 10:21:01 UTC