SDD again

[Peter Murray-Rust]

At 22:55 08/05/98 -0700, [several people] wrote:

[... important and occasionally emotive discussion of SDD snipped...]

This discussion exemplifies one of the roles we hoped XML-DEV could address
- that different people could make different semantic assumptions from the
spec. I am not surprised that this particular problem has surfaced because
the distinction between validity and well-formedness is new and because it
has been clear that it is a difficult one to formalise. In the current
situation it would appear that different parser-creators can create code
which can sometimes produce different parse trees from the same document.
[Please correct me if I'm wrong.] These writers are not incompetent - they
take different interpretations of what the spec requires to be done and
under what circumstances.

If - as appears - we have a spec which is fuzzy in places then we it would
be extremely useful to know - dispassionately - where the problems lie. If
they can be identified then we might be able to:
	- agree on a common course of action and/or
	- agree that the document creator could encode her wishes in some way and/or
	- agree that the parserwriter could make various options available to the
reader/client (e.g. through commandline switches).

Some validating parsers (e.g. DXP) already have commandline switches (e.g.
-v for validate) and I suspect that there will be increasing pressure to
add more ('ignore standalone declaration' for example). If we could
systematise these it could be one way to reduce unexpected effects of parsing.

[But I'm not the right person to offer :-)]

	P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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