[XML-SIG] State of the world

[Andrew Kuchling]

Lars Marius Garshol writes:
>I had a quick look at your proposal and had a question I never got
>round to asking: will the chr function be able to create characters
>like chr(2472)?

	If I recall correctly, yes it would.  There are still
outstanding issues with the implementation at the C level that will
have to be resolved.

>I think the way around it would be to have every document start with
>an XML declaration. That will make conforming parsers throw an error
>when the new document starts, which can be (maybe with a little 
>extension to the parsers) be caught and used to trigger some code that
>makes the parser consider the rest of the stream a new document.

Hmm...  wouldn't there then have to be a way to save that XML
declaration, in order to pass it back for subsequent parsing of the
second document?  If you're reading from a file-like object, you could
just seek back to before the declaration, but that doesn't work in
general, if you're reading from sys.stdin or a network connection.
Another approach might be an end-of-XML document PI, that means the
document is over, stop parsing now.  Would that make sense?

>Not that I can think of. You've covered all my worries, at least. More
>software would be nice, but I guess that will appear in due time.

Is there anything else that should go into the basic package?  A
module to parse DTDs, perhaps?  That would pave the way for checking
whether a document is conformant to a DTD.  Code for specific XML
DTDs, such as MathML or whatever, wouldn't be in the basic package, of 
course.

BTW, I forgot one relevant spec: XSL, the Extensible Style Language.
It doesn't seem to me as if we can do much about XSL at the moment;
the only draft dates back to August 21, 1997, and
<http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/> says that they're planning to release
the first working draft in July.  I'm also not clear whether it'll be
JavaScript-specific, or more language-independent; seems to be the
former...

-- 
A.M. Kuchling			http://starship.skyport.net/crew/amk/
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
	-- Wernher Von Braun