xml-dev - Re: Why the Infoset?

[Sean McGrath <sean@digitome.com>]

[Sean McGrath]
>
>> The only way to process them would be to do so *lexically*.
>> In shifting to a lexical based algorithm you would need to
>> basically *re-write* an XML parser in order to be sure
>> that you were identifying character entity references correctly
>> every time.
>
[Rick Jelliffe]
>You couldn't do it reliably: you could only guess based on some other
>out-of band information. (Such as a "character collection"
>specification)

Sorry for being a bit dumb but you have lost me. If it cannot
be done reliably, how does an XML parser do it?


[...]
>And  it means that you want the presence of a character reference to signify
>some processing instruction or semantic, it is tag abuse: use a PI or
>entityref or element.

It does not mean I want the presence of a character reference
to signify some processing instruction or semantic. Character
references exist in XML instances. I want to reliably find them.
Where is the tag abuse in that?

regards,

http://www.pyxie.org - an Open Source XML Processing library for Python