Justin Fletcher wrote:
I'm a little confused by all this discussion of never-ending XML
documents, mainly because my understanding is that without the
well-formedness checks the content might as well be free form, and the
elements within the document may rely on parts that have 'yet to arrive'.
Taking as an example the atom:author element, with the above example
of a never-ending document any atom:entry elements which exist would
be quite valid in containing no atom:author element because they're
not required to have one if the atom:feed element contains such an
author. And because the feed has not yet finished the reading
application cannot know that the document is invalid (or not - the
atom:author element may arrive at some point in the future).
If an atom:feed contains an author element, it is required by the spec
to appear before any atom:entry elements in the atom:feed.
(http://www.atompub.org/2005/08/17/draft-ietf-atompub-format-11.html#rfc.section.4.1.1)
so this isn't a problem. Further, the spec really does not define any
metadata that would be dependent on parts yet-to-arrive. There could be
a challenge with same-document links that use fragment identifiers, but
that's about it.
- James
