Re: Issue 4 Proposed Resolution (was: why no doc type declaration and PIs in SOAP)

Bob Hutchison wrote:
> 
> Actually, what I asked was how to skip over a PI or DTD without knowing what
> it was you were skipping over. In your example you know it is a PI. If you
> know it is a PI then why can't you fail immediately with the proper code? If
> you know it's a PI or DTD, why allow anything other than failure? What's
> this 'simple' processor that can skip a PI and DTD and not know what it was
> that it skipped?
> 
Before MS SOAP came out, we implemented a simple SOAP library using our
server-side JScript-based integration tool and XSLT. XSLT will tell me
if there is a PI, but the only way to detect a DTD is to parse the XML
document manually, which seems a perverse kind of simplification to me.

Why the assumption that SOAP tool developers will all be implementing
their own XML parsers? Why not use platform standards or open source
micro-parsers like Aelfred (the default parser for Saxon)? Or better,
assume that the library will be passed an in-memory representation such
as a DOM, SAX event stream or .NET XmlWriter?

Francis.

Received on Monday, 1 October 2001 18:47:29 UTC