RE: Options for dealing with IDs

Rick Jelliffe writes:
ERH> And what happens if it does? How does a document indicate 
ERH>that it is headless? Simply by not having a DOCTYPE? Or is 
ERH>this a parser option? What happens if a headless parser 
ERH>encounters a DOCTYPE? This feels very rough to me.
>
>If a headless parser finds a DOCTYPE it would fail.

That sounds good to me.  I've already written a parser[1] which ignores
DOCTYPE, passing its contents on to the (probably uncaring) application.
Telling it to fail would be trivial, and would (IMHO) solve more
problems than it creates.

Doing this makes headless XML parsers pretty much trivial to write, and
compensates for the increasing burden that scoped attributes like
namespaces and xml:base are adding to such projects. xml:id would be
relatively painless and make up for the loss of ID attribute
declarations.  Entities are a tougher problem.

[1] - http://simonstl.com/projects/tam/


-- 
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 Tuesday, 14 January 2003 14:39:11 UTC