Re: XInclude vs SAX vs validation

[Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 09:03:00PM -0700, David Brownell wrote:
> >      - id[/2/3] : highly unreliable because it requires a DTD + a parser
> >                   in validating mode (and DTD may not be available)
> 
> The "id" access does NOT require a parser in validating mode!
> It only requires reporting the [attribute type] information item.
> 
> Admittedly that's only defined for documents with a DTD that
> has appropriate ATTLIST declarations, but it's common for
> non-validating parsers to expose that information.  After all, they
> parsed those attribute decls so they could normalize and default.

  It also mean that you need to fetch/parse that DTDs, and in general
this is not in the internal subset. Catalogs helps avoiding the serious
problem of relying on a possibly remote document, but this construct
is still very fragile in practice.
  Admitedly, the XPath language requires this too :-( , but at least you
can can still point into a sub resource relibaly even if its DTD is not
available.
  At the end of the day, people don't want to take the risk, just convert
stuff to HTML because they know that that platform has the reliability
level needed (in term of deployment and level of interfaces), and that's
one more case where XML won't be used natively.
  That's actually the lesson I get, people in general are not interested
to move from HTML hypertext to XML hypertext, because they don't want to
face a platform change, they didn't switched to XHTML either even if all
concession were made to allow this at minimal cost. On the other hand
XSLT with can work without large deployment changes is now widely deployed.
  Time to work on something else and come back in a few years to see if
the situation evolved ... and if people manage to agree on what should be
standardized for hypertext if there is a need for a new platform.

Daniel

-- 
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