Martin Duerst wrote:
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>> Atom feeds served over HTTP MUST be well-formed XML 1.0, as defined in Section 2.1 of the XML specification <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-well-formed>. Furthermore, the concept of XML well-formedness relies on first determining the character encoding of the XML document. RFC 3023 defines how to determine the character encoding of XML documents served over HTTP.
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>The first sentence is redundant because all Atom feeds must be well-formed. The second sentence is plainly false. The two concepts are unrelated.
Could you explain/substantiate your claim that the second sentence is plainly false? I understand it to be true, and I have implementation experience with the W3C Markup Validator to back it up.
Illegal characters are fatal errors, which are quite likely when processing a document with the wrong encoding. Fatal errors aren't necessarily the result of ill-formed documents. In this case, the term "well-formed" seems to come down to the "Char" production, which is arrived at after decoding. It's possible to process an XML document with the wrong character encoding and still have a well-formed XML document.
In any case, this Pace is totally wrapped up in HTTP, pedantic, and incorrect in numerous ways.
Robert Sayre
