MSXML comments

[Chris Lovett]

> I played a little today with MSXML and have a couple of suggestions:

> - MSXML wrongly rejects this

> <!DOCTYPE DOC [
> <!ELEMENT DOC (#PCDATA)>
> <!ENTITY foo SYSTEM "foo.eps" NDATA EPS>
> <!NOTATION EPS SYSTEM "whatever">
> ]>
> <DOC></DOC>

> It appears to require notations to be declared before use in entity
> declarations rather than just declared in the DTD.  The XML spec could
> probably be clearer here, but this definitely is not desirable: you
> often need to declare external entities in the DTD subset that use
> notations declared in the DTD. It's also incompatible with SGML.

Yes, order independence of DTD's is not yet implemented.  We're still trying
to figure out how to implement this without slowing down the parser ?!

> - It appears to be impossible to prevent MSXML performing certain
> validity checks.  Worse, MSXML appears to apply Draconian error handling
> to validity errors not just to well-formedness errors.  This makes it
> impossible to parse some well-formed XML documents.  For example:

> <!DOCTYPE DOC [
> <!ELEMENT DOC (#PCDATA)>
> <!ENTITY foo SYSTEM "foo.eps" NDATA EPS>
> ]>
> <DOC></DOC>

> I would suggest that applications should be able to control whether
> validation is performed.  I would also suggest that validity errors not
> be handled as fatal errors using exceptions; instead, the parser should
> continue processing in the presence of validity errors, and should make
> information about validity errors available in the object model.

Yes, I agree.  Perhaps we should add a handleValidityError method to the
ElementFactory, and if the subclass returns true we continue on parsing or
something.  You can turn off DTD processing all together using RMD="NONE"

> - It requires the version attribute in the XML declaration to be in
> upper-case.  The draft still has "version" in lower case.

What's the story here anyway ?  We added support for case sensitivity, and
decided to make all XML reserved keywords upper case for consistency.


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