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I have followed the discussion on the TAG list and here, and I still fail to see what gets people upset about this. This specification defines a particular application of XML and the style of document that that application uses. As long as it doesn't purport to define a generalized XML parser, why is it wrong? This application won't accept all well-formed XML documents, but so what? Must every application that uses XML accept any XML document? That just doesn't make sense to me. What's the danger here? > -----Original Message----- > From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...] > Sent: Friday, February 21, 2003 7:59 AM > To: Mike Champion; xml-dev@l... > Subject: Re: The subsetting has begun > > 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@m... | 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/ | > | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | > +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an > initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> > > The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ > > To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription > manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>
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