- From: Andrew Layman <andrewl@microsoft.com>
- Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 12:37:27 -0700
- To: <xml-dist-app@w3.org>
I suggest that issue 4 should be split into two distinct issues, one to deal with PIs and the other with DTDs. Permitting Processing Instructions is pretty safe provided that readers are allowed to ignore them (at the reader's discretion). Given the definition of Processing Instruction at http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210, section 2.6, this is a safe reading. My motivation to permit PIs is primarily that the XML Protocol should be able to carry XML documents as body content without rewriting whenever possible. Since some documents may have PIs in them, and since scanning all content to remove PIs is expensive, allowing them is better both from the standpoint of efficiency and document fidelity. The cost/benefit analysis is very different for DTDs. A DTD is substantially more complicated to parse. It may make Infoset contributions, making skipping one unsafe. Permitting DTDs in messages is either pointless (if no infoset contributions are made) or expensive (if Infoset contributions appear).
Received on Monday, 1 October 2001 15:39:09 UTC