xml-dev - Re: Parser Behaviour (serious)

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

At 08:55 AM 4/5/00 -0400, THOMAS PASSIN wrote:
>Peter's suggested approach here is elegant and simple.  As for Tim B's
>statement about there being too many opinions about too many combinations,
>well, David Megginson has written that SAX only handles 80% of the xml-ish
>things you might like to do.  Let's strive towards agreement on 80% of the
>key possibilities here, and we will accomplish something really worth-while.
>
>Of course, even if we get a system such as Peter has asked for, older
>parsers will ignore any such directives.  So Peter's pharmaceutical warnings
>could still get ignored by any given processor.  But still, at least you
>could tell users that they could use a range of processors instead of just
>one.  That would be good.

This is sounding a bit more like my work on XPDL
(http://purl.oclc.org/NET/xpdl).  XPDL describes a larger number of
possible problems, and defines a format that resides outside of the actual
document, but a lot of these issues - parameter entities, attribute
defaulting, etc. - are already in there.  It may be more than the 80% you
want, but it could be a good thing to explore.

The slides I presented on XPDL in Montreal last August describe these
issues a bit less formally, and include some unofficial (probably
out-of-date) features and properties for SAX2 as well.  Those are at: 
http://www.simonstl.com/projects/xpdl/xpdl2/index.htm

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

***************************************************************************
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/
***************************************************************************