XML 1.0 spec appears to violate itself

[Takuki Kamiya]

David Brownell wrote:
>
> > Even if we assume "lt" could be redeclared in the internal DTD subset for now
> > (I guess we can even extrapolate this is the case since the spec itself
> > redeclares it) ...
> 
> It's clear that it _is_ permitted to redeclare entities (including the
> predeclared ones) in the internal subset.  See section 4.6 where it
> talks about various "may" (may redeclare) and "must" (must still be WF,
> and not change the standard effect) cases, none of which could work
> if such redeclaration were disallowed.
> 

I believe I read the spec exactly the same way as you did. What I
felt it is trying to stipulate was that "they (predefined entities)
must be declared as internal entities whose replacement text is the
single character being escaped or a character reference to that
character", not "as shown below". I am not as confident as you on
this since English nor XML is not my mother tongue though. ;-)

> > I think that XML processor shall find the entity as "not well-formed" when it
> > tries to expand references to "lt" (i.e. < ) if it have been redeclared
> > as "<", because "<" does not match the production rule for content.
> > 
> > Am I missing something?
> 
> Only that, as Richard implied, most XML processors treat those entities
> as "predefined" and so any additional declarations are often ignored.
> That's permitted; the spec says a warning "may" be issued, but they're
> not required.
> 

As Paul Grosso pointed out, the word "redeclare" does not appear in
section 4.6 at least literally. Then another question have occurred
to me. Does the spec insist that predefined entities be dealt as if
they were _physically_declared_ ? If the answer to this question is
NO, explicit declarations for predefined entities are not additional
declaration really, hence it should be respected and wf-error needs
to be reported for some cases such as "lt" having been declared as "<".

= Takuki Kamiya  Phone: (045)476-4586 Fax: (045)476-4749   =
= FUJITSU LIMITED (COINS:7128-4217 NIFTY:HHA01731)         =



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