Partial DTDs (was: ModSAX: Proposed Core Features)

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 02:33 PM 3/12/99 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>No, it doesn't.  An NVP is privileged to not read any and all external
>entities with the sole exception of the document entity, which it
>must read.
>
>In practice, however, I suspect that all NVPs fall into one of the
>following four classes:
>
>1) Read only the document entity.
>
>2) Read the whole DTD but no external general entities.
>
>3) Read all external general entities, but only process
>the internal DTD subset.
>
>4) Read all external entities (except unparsed entities).

I think 4 should read:

4) Read the document, the internal subset, the external subset, and all
external entities except unparsed entities.

(In my experience with Aelfred, that's what it does, though I'll admit to
not actually using entities in 'real' practice.)

I guess the question comes down to whether your interpretation of current
practice is reason enough to combine the external subset and external
entities in this situation.  Given the point Sean McGrath just raised about
things (INCLUDE/IGNORE, but also certain kinds of PE processing) that are
legal in the external DTD subset but not in the internal subset or external
PEs referenced from the internal subset, I'd say to keep these things
separate.

Of course, we could create a feature that simply referred to external
resources, combining both properties, on top of the external PEs/external
subset features.  Might be the best of all worlds, though it would take
some clear documentation identifying what happened if you used both the
convenience feature and its sub-parts.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications (April)
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http://www.simonstl.com

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