Re: XInclude vs SAX vs validation

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:

> I'm wondering if for Infoset compatibility it's time to add the
> comment() method to the ContentHandler class and require parsers to
>  report comments.

I think this is a Bad Thing (comments should be discarded with the
rest of the lexical cruft).  In any event, citing the Infoset is
no justification.  Remember that conformance to the Infoset means
citing what parts of it you use and what parts you don't.
XInclude is silent on this point, which means that it transmits
just so much of the Infoset as the underlying infoset creators
provided.

Historically, comments are in the infoset because they are in the
XPath 1.0 data model, and they are there, IIRC, because some
(benighted, IMHO) people thought that scripts embedded in HTML
were comments because they began with "<!--" and ended with "-->".

(The HTML DTD makes it clear that SCRIPT is a CDATA element,
a type that does not exist in XML, in which everything is
quoted except the sequence "</" followed by a letter, which
terminates the element.)

Speaking for myself, as always, not the Core WG.
-- 
Not to perambulate             || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
    the corridors               || http://www.reutershealth.com
during the hours of repose     || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    in the boots of ascension.  \\ Sign in Austrian ski-resort hotel