XML Torture Test: Parsers Fail

roddey at us.ibm.com roddey at us.ibm.com
Mon Apr 19 23:50:53 BST 1999




>> I don't see anything in the spec that says "don't read and validate
>> external parsed entities if they're not used."  And in fact, the spec
>> seems to say that, in order to be valid, they must (whether used or not)
>> match certain productions in the grammar.
>
>Surely the question a validating parser is supposed to answer is not
>whether the external parsed entities are valid, but whether the
>*document* is valid.
>

I agree with the latter myself. Once again, sorry for the late
contributions, I just got back from my so called vacation (in which the
weather totally sucked until I came back :-)

I could see the utility in having a specific flag on your implementation to
force such 'heavy' validation, but I would argue against being forced to
scan it if its not even referenced in all cases. It would be  a nice tool
for DTD developers to use before putting out the DTD.

But I probably wouldn't want my file, which only used 10% of some heavy
duty DTD/Schema, to have to pay the cost to fully validate the DTD/Schema
every time I used it, just to make sure for the one millionth time today
that it was fully correct.



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