Re: [xml-dev] Debating "civil disobedience" against overly complicatedspecs

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

At 9:17 AM +0200 9/24/01, Eric van der Vlist wrote:

>Even this definition is blur and cannot fully answer the question asked by SOAP: is the doctype markup syntax or document content?
>
>I would say it is markup syntax, but this perception light be application dependant...
>
>The case of the doctype is also complicated by the fact that the doctype doesn't find it's way into the XPath data model and that all the XPath based tools have no way to test the presence of a doctype and by the architectural issues it can bring for XML messages (what if a reference to a relative URI is made, what if the content of an external entity changes over time, ...?).

Note that although the DOCTYPE declaration doesn't find its way into the XPath data model, default attribute values supplied by the DTD included in or referenced by the DOCTYPE declaration do indeed find their way into the XPath data model. 

Furthermore, in other non-XPath data models such as the Infoset, other features of the DTD also worm their way into the instance document. In particular notations, unparsed entities, and attribute types are really nasty because they are properties of attributes (or perhaps elements) and yet the syntax that describes these properties of things in the instance document can only be found in the DTD. These are currently causing me fits in implementing XInclude properly. 
-- 

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