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Consider the following simple XML document:
<Greeting importance="1">
Hello!
</Greeting>
Notice that this document has no DTD. What is the type of the
importance attribute?
I've been saying that in cases like this, importance has type CDATA
by default. However, Laurent Bihanic pointed out to me that the only
place in the XML spec that indicates this really only refers to
attribute value normalization, not to anything else. This is in
section 3.3.3 which states:
All attributes for which no declaration has been read should be
treated by a non-validating processor as if declared CDATA.
This does *not* say that such attributes do have type CDATA, and I
can't find anything else in the spec that says they do. (The
restriction to non-validating processors here is IMO an erratum in
the spec which I just reported to the editors.) I think we should
delete the UNDECLARED_ATTRIBUTE field and use CDATA as the default
attribute type.
The SAX JavaDoc does says this. See
http://www.saxproject.org/apidoc/org/xml/sax/Attributes.html#getType(int)
which states:
The attribute type is one of the strings "CDATA", "ID", "IDREF",
"IDREFS", "NMTOKEN", "NMTOKENS", "ENTITY", "ENTITIES", or "NOTATION"
(always in upper case).
If the parser has not read a declaration for the attribute, or if the
parser does not report attribute types, then it must return the value
"CDATA" as stated in the XML 1.0 Recommentation (clause 3.3.3,
"Attribute-Value Normalization").
However, it's not at all clear that SAX is correct here. I think SAX
may need to change in order to distinguish between genuine CDATA
attributes and undeclared or untyped attributes. Thoughts?
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
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