[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
>> The word "ignorable" is an
>> unfortunate choice here. It means the application receiving the data
>> may choose to ignore it. However, the parser cannot ignore this
>> content. It must provide it.
>I am willing to take that on faith, but just for the sake of throroughness,
>my question is more "why must it provide it". It seems that the same
>argument could be made for element and attribute declarations. Clearly the
>parser cannot ignore them, yet it is not required that the information be
>passed in one of the default interfaces-- they are only reported through the
>DeclHandler, an extension interface.
We must be quite clear here: it is the whitespace characters that
*must* be provided, not the fact that they are ignorable. Only
validating parsers have to report that.
A non-validating parser is free to return ignorable whitespace using the
characters() callback instead, even in the presence of a DTD.
But a validating parser must report the fact that it's ignorable, and
SAX chose to report ignorableness by using a different callback. If
that callback wasn't part of ContentHandler, you would have the
slightly strange situation that which interface reported the
characters would be different depending on whether you used a
validating parser.
>IIRC, the SAX interface set predates the Infoset spec, so any mandate to
>provide specific information to the application must have come from
>somewhere else.
As you observe, it's the XML spec that requires this. The Infoset does
not place any requirements on what must be reported, just a terminology
for how to describe it.
-- Richard
|
