xml-dev - MSXML comments

[James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>]

I played a little today with MSXML and have a couple of suggestions:

- MSXML wrongly rejects this

<!DOCTYPE DOC [
<!ELEMENT DOC (#PCDATA)>
<!ENTITY foo SYSTEM "foo.eps" NDATA EPS>
<!NOTATION EPS SYSTEM "whatever">
]>
<DOC></DOC>

It appears to require notations to be declared before use in entity
declarations rather than just declared in the DTD.  The XML spec could
probably be clearer here, but this definitely is not desirable: you
often need to declare external entities in the DTD subset that use
notations declared in the DTD. It's also incompatible with SGML.

- It appears to be impossible to prevent MSXML performing certain
validity checks.  Worse, MSXML appears to apply Draconian error handling
to validity errors not just to well-formedness errors.  This makes it
impossible to parse some well-formed XML documents.  For example:

<!DOCTYPE DOC [
<!ELEMENT DOC (#PCDATA)>
<!ENTITY foo SYSTEM "foo.eps" NDATA EPS>
]>
<DOC></DOC>

I would suggest that applications should be able to control whether
validation is performed.  I would also suggest that validity errors not
be handled as fatal errors using exceptions; instead, the parser should
continue processing in the presence of validity errors, and should make
information about validity errors available in the object model.

- It requires the version attribute in the XML declaration to be in
upper-case.  The draft still has "version" in lower case.

James


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