xml-dev - Re: ModSAX: Proposed Core Features

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

After a few months of intense busy-ness (and business), plus a trip to
XTech that I'm still recovering from, I'm finally catching up to ModSAX.
Printed it all out, looked it all over, and mostly I'm very pleased.  I
think it'll make implementing my Layered Model proposal as a a Layered
Parser much easier overall.

One key thing is missing at this stage, and that's a feature.

At 08:16 PM 3/9/99 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
>Here's my revised version of the core feature list, based on recent
>discussions:
>
>
>ModSAX Core Features
>--------------------
>
>http://xml.org/sax/features/validation
>  Validate (true) or don't validate (false).
>
>http://xml.org/sax/features/external-general-entities
>  Expand external general entities (true) or don't expand (false).
>
>http://xml.org/sax/features/external-parameter-entities
>  Expand external parameter entities (true) or don't expand (false).
>
>http://xml.org/sax/features/namespaces
>  Preprocess namespaces (true) or don't preprocess (false).  See also
>  the http://xml.org/sax/properties/namespace-sep property.
>
>http://xml.org/sax/features/normalize-text
>  Ensure that all consecutive text is returned in a single callback to
>  DocumentHandler.characters or DocumentHandler.ignorableWhitespace
>  (true) or explicitly do not require it (false).
>

We need:

http://xml.org/sax/features/external-subset

   Requires the parser to load the external subset of the DTD and process
it.  (External parameter entities remain a separate issue referenced by a
separate feature.)

This is critically important for attribute defaulting, which makes things
like XLink much much simpler.  At one point I switched parsers, only to
find that my attribute values in the external subset had all disappeared.
I promptly jumped back.  The spec (5.1) allows non-validating parsers to
skip the external subset; I'd very much like to have a way to tell the
parser not to skip it, or at least know that they are in fact being skipped.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications (April)
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http://www.simonstl.com

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