New schema spec

John Cowan cowan at locke.ccil.org
Mon May 10 21:52:02 BST 1999


Rick Jelliffe wrote:

> P.S. Am I the only one freaking out that the current Schema draft is not
> compatible with XML 1.0?  It introduces a new class "nearly well-formed"
> which is not WF: thus all current XML processors will treat these
> documents in error.

You are not.  I am preparing a blast which will shred this nonsense
once and for all ^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W well-reasoned comment explaining
to the Schema WG the error of their ways.  I'll post it here when
done as well as to the official comments list.

> This is a terrible excercise in backwards
> incompatability--all existing XML processors will be incompatible: the
> only reason they have this class is because they try to cram into the
> Schema spec some way to declare entities (I thought that XLink was our
> way to improve entities: now we have 3 ways to do them...Yikes).  It
> reduces XSchema's credibility a lot--it makes it look like there is a
> petty dislike of XML's markup declaration syntax which was so strong
> that it overweighed the requirement to conform to XML 1.0 WF rules.

Furthermore, it means that a document as read by a 1.0-compliant
read-all-entities non-validating parser may have different *content*
from one read by a schema-reading non-schema-validating parser,
if both external DTD and schema are specified, and they have
different definitions for the same entities.

XLink fully displaces entities only if the "data:" URL scheme
(RFC 2397) is widely supported; this is the URL equivalent of
internal entities.  (More accurately, it allows external
entities that are represented internally.)

-- 
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)

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