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At 1:44 AM -0800 12/9/01, Jeff Lowery wrote:
>REPOST <sigh/>
>--------------
>
>> What makes a well-formed XML document "not XML" ?
>
>If some spec states that certain XML attributes are ordered, then that may
>be well-formed XML, but there's no guarantee that any processor in the wild
>is going to respect that. Is the spec still describing XML? Well, yeah,
>kinda-sorta, but it's not respecting the standard and has to be carefully
>handled. You just can't toss it off anywhere.
>
I'd argue that any spec that imposes additional constraints on
processors not imposed by XML 1.0 is not compliant with XML.
Requiring attribute order to be maintained would be one such
constraint. Another would be treating a character inserted via a
character reference differently than a character typed literally.
(WML has this problem.) The documents in such applications might be
well-formed XML documents, but the processors that handle these
documents are not compliant XML parsers.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ |
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