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At 10:26 AM -0500 10/30/02, Seairth Jacobs wrote:
>2) I see no problem with having a parser that ignores portions of XML spec
>if it will never encounter those portions, such as DTDs or PIs (CDATA in his
>example). He claims this would cause interoperability issues. Where and
>How?
It depends on what you mean by "ignore". If they simply don't report
them to the client app that's one thing. However, they are absolutely
required to read processing instructions and the document type
declaration and report any well-formedness errors in these
constructs. A parser that does not do this is not an XML parser. I
have seen more than one parser vendor try to leave this required
functionality out of their toolkit.
With regard to the internal DTD subset, it goes a little further.
Even at the minimum conformance level, parsers are required to apply
default attribute values and expand internal entity references
declared in the internal DTD subset, at least up to the first
external entity they don't resolve. Parsers that don't do this can
cause real interoperability problems.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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| XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ |
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