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At 1:56 PM -0500 3/5/02, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> Well that sequence of bytes may actually become a set of sequences
>as soon as one is dealing with external entities.
A good point. The way the spec is written though I think it's
consistent to claim that the document is only the byte/character
sequence that references the external entities. It does not actually
include the merged text of the entities. The spec also states that:
[Definition: A textual object is a well-formed XML document if:]
1. Taken as a whole, it matches the production labeled document.
2. It meets all the well-formedness constraints given in this specification.
3. Each of the parsed entities which is referenced directly or
indirectly within the document is well-formed.
Point 3 in particular indicates that the entities are not part of the
document, even though the parser may treat them as if they were.
> Still the Jabber case is an interesting example in my opinion because
>they stretch the usual principle of keeping instances "atomic" and instead
>agree to work on a long lived "never ending" document. And in such use
>case entities doesn't work (because there isn't even a DOCTYPE at the
>start of the connection), while XInclude does (assuming the parser handle
>them of course), it's intersing to see various specification taken from
>a Jabber view point, a lot of them actually requires a full document
>instance and won't work directly in such a context.
>
Another good point. However, the BNF grammar and well-formedness
constraints make it clear that an infinite sequence cannot possibly
be a well-formed XML document. Thus my definition of data object
should be revised to say "either a finite sequence of bytes or a
finite sequence of Unicode characters". I don't know if a Jabber
document is truly infinite or just indefinitely large. (Looking at
the spec I think it's just indefinite.)
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
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