Subject: XML point

From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 17:21:53 +0200

In the meeting today, Frank asserted that, under the current attachments
scheme, a validating XML parser would validate the attachments.  This
appears not to be the case; section 4.4.6 of the XML spec states:

     When the name of an unparsed entity appears as a token in the
     value of an attribute of declared type ENTITY or ENTITIES, a
     validating processor must inform the application of the system
     and public (if any) identifiers for both the entity and its
     associated notation.

The annotated spec includes a note that clarifies that this is *all* the
processor has to do.  It's not even clear to me that the processor has
to verify that the system identifier is a valid URI; the only syntax for
it that's provided in the XML spec is:

     SystemLiteral::=('"' [^"]* '"') | ("'" [^']* "'")

There is an assertion later on that it is a URI, but this can include
pretty much any string (once you include relative URIs).

For this reason (and because the notation scheme for typing does not
provide any information to anybody that doesn't know the notation names
used by the sender), I assert again that the <!ENTITY>-based scheme
gives no benefit over a src=uri attribute.

--
/=============================================================\
|John Stracke    | My opinions are my own | S/MIME & HTML OK  |
[email-masked]|============================================|
|Chief Scientist | NT's lack of reliability is only surpassed |
|eCal Corp.      |  by its lack of scalability. -- John Kirch |
\=============================================================/