Comments on xml-stylesheet

Some comments on "Associating Style Sheets with XML documents 1.0 
(Second Edition), Editor's Draft 4 December 2009":

"The string matched by PseudoAttValue in the PseudoAtt production — 
after any CharRefs and PredefEntityRefs are replaced with the characters 
they represent — constitutes the value of the corresponding 
pseudo-attribute." - the matched string includes the surrounding quotes; 
they ought to be stripped off before determining the pseudo-attribute value.

"Each PredefEntityRef in PseudoAttValue is replaced with with ..." 
s/with with/with/

Section 3 doesn't says what the parsing result is, except in the cases 
where it's an error. It should probably say something explicit like "If 
the parsing result is not an error, then it is the set of 
pseudo-attributes represented when the given string is matched by the 
PseudoAtts production."

"If it's not reported to the application" - s/it's/it is/

" [1] StyleSheetPI ::= "<?xml-stylesheet" (S PseudoAtts)? - (Char* "?>" 
Char*) "?>" "
Should be:
" [1] StyleSheetPI ::= "<?xml-stylesheet" ((S PseudoAtts)? - (Char* "?>" 
Char*)) "?>" "
since the precedence of the XML EBNF '-' operator is undefined.

"If specified, documents may use any string as the value." - seems like 
abuse of RFC2119 terminology. "X may do Y" means X can optionally choose 
to do Y or to not do Y, but it's impossible to choose not to use any 
string as the value if you specify the value. Maybe s/may/can/ (there's 
no need to use a conformance requirement keyword when you're not 
requiring anything).

"Any links to style sheets that are specified externally to the document 
(e.g. Link headers in some versions of HTTP [RFC2068]) are considered to 
occur before the associations specified by the xml-stylesheet processing 
instructions." - what considers them, in what context? This isn't a 
conformance requirement, and doesn't apply to the listed conformance 
classes, and it doesn't look like an example or a note, and it doesn't 
reference any spec that defines that behaviour, so I don't understand 
why the sentence is in this spec. It should be removed, or rephrased to 
make its intentions clear.

-- 
Philip Taylor
pjt47@cam.ac.uk

Received on Monday, 7 December 2009 19:51:07 UTC