Re: DOCTYPEs in result documents

At 12:09 AM +0200 6/8/03, Daniel Veillard wrote:

>   I don't think there is any normative text about saving back an Infoset to
>an XML entity though :-)
>

That is the problem, isn't it. The XSLT conformance tests get around 
this by defining their own mapping from the Infoset (or the XPath 
data model) to XML, and then outputting and  canonicalizing that. 
It's messy, but it's necessary to really resolve issues like this.

Short of that, if we're going to have sensible results, then there 
needs to be an assumption that the conversion from the infoset to the 
actual XML documents presented as test results should not add 
information items to the output that were not present in the input 
document. Since the Document Type Declaration is an Information Item, 
I think these test results are actively wrong. They strongly suggest 
that the expected output contains an information item it does not in 
fact contain.

The problems much trickier for the cases where it's necessary to add 
a document type declaration in order to represent the notations, 
unparsed entities, attribute types and other infoset augmentations 
performed by the DTD. In that case, you may well be dealing with a 
genuinely unserializable infoset; e.g. one that has a notations 
property on the document information item but not document type 
information item. In hindsight, it was probably a mistake to make the 
notations and unparsed entities properties of the document 
information item rather than the document type information item, but 
we're stuck with it now. I don't think this can be fixed short of 
going to a more complex test framework like that used for XSLT 
conformance testing.
-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@metalab.unc.edu
   Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA

Received on Saturday, 14 June 2003 09:59:52 UTC