RE: Options for dealing with IDs

At 3:57 AM +1100 1/15/03, Rick Jelliffe wrote:


>It would be a parser option or parser type, just as WF or Validating 
>are currently
>parser options or types.


OK, so what you have is a parser that can fail on a significant 
subset of well-formed documents. That I at least understand so it's 
not rough. It doesn't change the definition of XML 1.0 or an XML 
document in any way, so I like that. However, I still don't like the 
parser.

Why would anybody use such a thing? It's not as if DOCTYPE aware 
parsers are hard to find or expensive in either time, money, or 
memory. Why would you want to restrict the syntax of the documents 
you can process? (Yes, I know SOAP does this. I think SOAP is wrong, 
and this brain damage should not be encouraged to propagate into 
other domains.) I don't want to allow subsets of XML syntax to be 
defined and required. It's an interoperability disaster. The external 
DTD subset issues blessed by XML 1.0 or bad enough. Let's not 
compound that mistake by making the internal DTD subset and DOCTYPE 
declaration also subject to parser option. "The number of optional 
features in XML is to be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero."
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|           Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava             |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA  |
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Received on Thursday, 16 January 2003 10:12:53 UTC