On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 10:36:48AM +0200, Hussein Shafie wrote:
> DTD-less DocBook files are not *documents*. You can call them fragments,
> modules, external entities, whatever.
They may not be DocBook *documents*, but they are certainly XML
*documents*. (In the prolog, the doctypedecl is optional[0].) I want
to summarize what I believe are your conclusions before I go on. If I
understand what you've said in your response correctly, XXE will always
save files as either XML fragments or well-formed XML documents (and as
we have seen, neither set is a subset of the other). I had simply
expected XXE to always save well-formed XML documents.
I realize now that my expectation was unreasonable because it is useful
for XXE users to be able to edit XML fragments as fragments. Further, I
can disable this XML fragment editing behavior with an XXE option[1].
To try to justify why this "makes me uncomfortable", however, I can
still anticipate cases where a user would perceive such a DTD-less file
as an instance of a particular vocabulary. In this mode of operation, a
well-formed XML document would be determined to be a valid document in a
particular language (such as DocBook) by an external validation process.
This allows for alternate validation mechanisms (besides DTDs) and a
modular approach to validation. In fact, this has been my mindset all
along, and that extended to my use of XXE, which has always seemed to me
to have a novel and elegant way of deciding how to validate a particular
document.
Take care,
John L. Clark
[0] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#NT-prolog
[1] Would it be possible to specify default options in XXE configuration
files?
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