xml-dev - RE: Parser Behaviour (serious)

["Didier PH Martin" <martind@netfolder.com>]

Hi Steve,

| Didier said:
| So, if I understand well, these parser automatically turn on the
validation
| process when a DOCTYPE is encountered in the file. You have to manually
turn
| off validation with an command line option. Is that right? I'll enter that
| info in my notebook.

Steve said:
I don't think they are working in validation mode,
but my understanding is that they must fetch the
DTD in case there are default attribute values
(at a minimum) lurking in there that might affect
what info the parser makes available to the application.

Didier replies:
Thank you Steve for the precision. So it seems that this behavior is OK
because, indeed, there can be default attribute values. Therefore, the DTD
document can be considered as an integral part to the XML document. So, the
right thing to do then is to remove the DTD declaration from the XML
document. But, if the XHTML parser needs some attributes that are contained
in the DTD, there should be a local DTD document version for local
processing as an HTML processor would also do in the SGML world (especially
if you are disconnected from the network). So, here, we are facing the same
behavior as in the SGML world. Now the question is: Can an XHTML document be
parsed without the DTD. Are there any dependencies to attributes or entities
declared in the DTD? if yes, we then need to apply the same rules than in
the SGML world and have a local copy to the DTD. In that case, it would be
better to use a catalog and have a location independent identifier for the
DTD.

Some things evolve and some problem still have to endured. Is this what we
call different kings, same kingdom :-))

Cheers
Didier PH Martin
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