xml-dev - RE: new msxml behaviour

[Chris Lovett <clovett@microsoft.com>]

> the new msxml contains this code within getText of ElementImpl which
> changes the behaviour of entity expansions from the previous version:
> 
> for (Enumeration en = children.elements(); en.hasMoreElements(); )
> {
> 	if (sb.length() > 0)
>        	sb.append(' ');
>        sb.append(((Element)en.nextElement()).getText());
> }
> 
> return sb.toString();
> 
> notice the appending of a space. is this appropriate? it means constructs
> like 'abc&SOME.ENTITY;def' expand to 'abc SOME.ENTITY.CONTENTS def' rather
> than  'abcSOME.ENTITY.CONTENTSdef' like it used to which really stuffs my
> application.
> 
[Chris Lovett]  This was bogus - and will be removed.

> the last time i tried to 'improve' msxml the damn thing proved incredibly
> difficult to recompile due to some ridiculuous circular dependancies among
> the files - god knows how ms compiled it in the first place - anyway i now
> see this awful dll rubbish in there so before i attempt to make a makefile
> (*please* supply one next time ms :) ) is this in fact a problem? or
> should
> i change my approach.
> 
[Chris Lovett]  Sorry about that.  The wonders of Visual J++ I guess.

> i was also wondering whether defaults for attributes should appear to the
> application if the attribute isn't explicitly given in the markup. right
> now i've added a function to traverse the tree and insert all attribute
> defaults (if needed) before i start processing the document - what do you
> think of that?
> 
[Chris Lovett]  Yes, we've talked about this in the DOM group. 

> the msxml api was awful for getting schema information such as default
> values. now it has a 'toSchema' function which returns an element with
> child elements for each attribute. the child element's tag is 'ATTRIBUTE'
> and it contains attributes such as 'XML:ID' containing the attribute name
> and 'XML:DEFAULT' containing the default, for instance. this is an
> incredibly convoluted method for accessing such information - are there
> any
> other xml parsers out there that attach schema information to the markup
> element itself - like element.getAttribute("xyz").getDefaultValue() rather
> than
> document.getElementDecl("abc").getChild("xyz").getAttribute("XML:DEFAULT")
> .
> 
[Chris Lovett]  Careful how much you rail against this schema format. This
is just plain XML you know.  If you are having a hard time navigating plain
XML then perhaps the Object Model needs richer navigational methods...

> finally (i've been saving up questions) i'd like this construct to be
> parsed as a <bar> element...
> 
> <!ENTITY foo '<![CDATA[ 
>   <bar>blah blah</bar>
> ]]>'>
> 
> ...
> 
> &foo;
> 
> but instead, &foo; is processed as PCDATA (by msxml). is this correct
> behaviour? section 4.4 of the xml ref contains the following: '6.For an
> internal (text) entity, the processor must include the entity; that is,
> retrieve its replacement text and process it as a part of the document
> (i.e. as content or AttValue, whichever was being processed when the
> reference was recognized), passing the result to the application in place
> of the reference. The replacement text may contain both text and markup,
> which must be recognized in the usual way...'
[Chris Lovett]  You'll get a <BAR> element in the object model if you drop
the CDATA section.  So you're entity would be: <!ENTITY foo '<bar>blah blah
blah</bar>'>


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