DOCTYPE + SAX

Sat Apr 9 09:53:43 EDT 2011

I'm trying to get xml.sax to interpret a file that begins with…

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://
www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

After a while I get...

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd:31:2: error in processing
external entity reference

…although…

time curl http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd

…gives…

real	0m26.888s
user	0m0.006s
sys	0m0.013s

Is this a rookie mistake? Should I expect a python SAX parser to
incorporate entities from a remote DTD into it's parsing
interpretation?