Entities and non-validation

David Brownell david-b at pacbell.net
Wed Nov 3 17:36:10 GMT 1999


Good catch.

When the nonvalidating parser ignored one or more external PEs,
this isn't a fatal error.  SAX2 (alpha still) has ways to report
the situation, as I noted elsewhere in my response.

My general advice is still to avoid nonvalidating parsers that
don't read external entities, since the failure modes get so
confusing.

- Dave


Steve Dahl wrote:
> 
> David Brownell wrote:
> 
> > >         3) General entities in the document
> >
> > Violates a WFC -- fatal error, full stop.
> 
> No. If the parser has failed to read part of the external subset of the DTD (because it is not
> validating), an undeclared entity reference in the document content is not a fatal error. The
> fatal error, full stop, only occurs if you are certain that you've read the entire DTD, and
> still have not encountered a declaration for the named entity.
> 
> So, if the entity is undeclared, and it's not a fatal error, what should you do?
> 
> --
> - Steve Dahl
> sdahl at goshawk.com

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