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

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

David Megginson wrote:
> 
> David Brownell writes:
> 
>  > I forgot to mention:  it's not "external" entities that are the issue,
>  > so some other name would be needed:
>  >
>  >      <foo> &bar; </foo>
>  >
>  > can be sanely reported regardless of whether "bar" is internal or
>  > external ...
> 
> Granted -- my suggestion was just to skip all internal entities for
> consistency.

But the PE version of the problem wouldn't work that way; you can
expand external PEs "inside" markup, though you can't do that for
general entities ("inside" just being inside attribute values).


>  I am not willing to let this issue hold up SAX2, because I do not
>  believe that it is important enough (a minor point for an optional
>  add-on handler that few sane users should care about).

An acceptable fix is easy:  just delete those methods.

This isn't minor.  The API as specified is broken.  It was known to
be broken in alpha.  There's a simple fix.

LexicalHandler is more important than you're giving it credit for.  It's
one of the things that got SAX2 started (first discussions well over a
year ago).  The fact that not every system needs those other handlers
doesn't mean that people who need them aren't "sane".

Though I'd shuffle some functions around a bit ... the skippedEntity()
call is a lexical issue, and the startDTD call is bundled with a
declaration (for the root name).


>  > so some other rename would be needed to address such issues.
>  > {start,end}ContentEntity maybe?
> 
> Obviously, there are a few people who feel strongly.  Maybe we should
> spin off the optional handlers as a separate distribution and put
> someone else in charge of it.  Any volunteers?

I don't think that kind of fix is desirable for this particular problem;
it's a case of not putting broken functionality in what's already part
of the SAX2 feature set.

Spinning off a separate project for a token-level parsing API, which
is where entity expansion belongs, might be necessary to get entity
APIs right.  But I've seen no real advocates for entity APIs.

- Dave

***************************************************************************
This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers.
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@xml.org&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev
List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/threads.html
***************************************************************************