SAX, non-validating parsers, and external parsed entity references

[John Cowan]

There seems to be no way for a SAX-compliant parser that does
*not* expand external parsed entity references (as explicitly
permitted in clause 5.1, to report that it has encountered one.
Thus, given an resource with the URI "foo" whose content is
"<TEST/>", and a document as follows:

<!DOCTYPE MAIN [
	<!ENTITY FOO SYSTEM "foo">
	]>
<MAIN>
	This document is a &foo;
</MAIN>

a conformant parser may return either of the following event streams:

	startDocument(); startElement("MAIN");
	characters("\tThis document is a ");
	startElement("TEST"); endElement("TEST");
	characters("\n"); endElement("MAIN"); endDocument();

or

	startDocument(); startElement("MAIN");
	characters("\tThis document is a ");
	characters("\n"); endElement("MAIN"); endDocument();

Parsers of the first kind cannot even report that they have left
something out!  This seems to me to be a substantial deficiency
in SAX.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan at ccil.org
	You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
	You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
		Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)