document [standalone] property should be defaulted to 'no'

The version of the infoset spec at

   http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-infoset-20040204/

says, of the document information item's [standalone] property

     This property ... has no value if there is no standalone
     document declaration.

But the XML specification says

     If there are no external markup declarations, the standalone
     document declaration has no meaning. If there are external
     markup declarations but there is no standalone document
     declaration, the value "no" is assumed.

This seems to me to indicate that the correct thing for the
infoset spec to do is to specify that the property defaults to
the value 'no'.  (This gives a value to the property in cases
where the XML spec does not specify a value, but those cases
are also those for which the XML spec says it does not matter,
since in those cases the value has no meaning.)

I think the infoset spec should specify a default value of 'no'
for this property.

Am I wrong?

--C. M. Sperberg-McQueen

Received on Tuesday, 26 February 2008 16:40:14 UTC