Re: Conformance in XML processors

James Clark (jjc@jclark.com)
Sun, 18 Jan 1998 15:47:47 +0700


Tim Bray wrote:

> No. The spec is clear; a non-validating processor is required to
> do internal entities and default attribute values. Nobody should
> expect one to do anything with notations or unparsed entities or
> anything else. You want that, get a validating processor.

I think I would expect a non-validating processor to inform the
application about any unparsed entities that have been declared in the
internal subset. A non-validating processor has to keep track of this,
because it has to report an error if any of them are referenced. I don't
see that passing this information on to the application has anything to
do with validation.

The only things I expect of a validating processor that I don't expect
of a non-validating processor are:

- processing the external DTD subset

- processing parameter entity references

- reporting violations of validity constraints

- reporting that character data is ignorable white space

James