xml-dev - Re: SAX2: relative ordering of startDocument() & startDTD() events?

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

David Brownell writes:

 > > How about if we renamed them to start/endExternalEntity and forgot
 > > altogether about signalling internal entity boundaries?
 > 
 > That'd work for me.  (Just saw this note, sorry -- mailer troubles.)
 > 
 > But I don't think I really understand the requirement here.  I know
 > that DOM exposes such boundaries.  But every time I've tried to do
 > anything with them in a DOM that produced them, I had to write code
 > to rip them out -- they're just trouble.

I agree.  There was a lot of (unfortunate) confusion during the
initial XML design process between entity references and links,
despite the fact that Eliot Kimber laboured bravely and beyond any
reasonable human endurance to convince people of the difference.
That's why

a) non-validating processors are allowed to skip external entity
   references; and

b) editor and repository vendors during the DOM design process were
   convinced that they needed to be able to manage external entities
   separately.

Of course, the long delay in XLink didn't help.

 > Is there another source of a requirement for such boundaries, other
 > than partial DOM support?  Because I'd as soon not reinforce that
 > troublesome part of DOM.

The only reason that I'm including this is that the DOM implementors
want it very, very badly.

 > Were this feature to stay, would those boundaries need to be reported,
 > or would this be exposed in a feature flag?  Or would the meanings
 > of the existing {ex,in}ternal-entities feature flags cover that issue?

I assumed that the whole LexicalHandler would be a package deal (and
one that 99% of apps could happily ignore).


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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