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At 8:40 AM -0500 2/21/03, Mike Champion wrote:
>Anyone following sml-dev three years ago would not be surprised to
>hear that vendors are subsetting XML for mobile, data-oriented
>applications. Where's the "sin" here? What's a cellphone supposed
>to do with an external entity reference, or a notation declaration?
>Should well-known interoperability antipatterns such as default
>attribute values be encouraged in lightweight applications?
The sin is in forbidding the document type declaration. If they
choose not to load any external entities, then that's blessed by XML.
However, this does not give them freedom to reject documents that
contain such things, or to drop out lexical features of XML such as
default attribute values and internal entities declared in the
internal DTD subset.
I suspect part of the problem is that the members of the expert group
did not have a clear understanding of the difference between
validation and reading the DTD, between the DTD and the document type
declaration, and between the internal and external DTD subsets.
These are common areas of confusion for a lot of developers. However,
if you're going to write specs, you need to understand such matters
better than the average developer.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
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