[XML-SIG] 4DOM compliance potential problem

[Uche Ogbuji]

> > It seems to me that 4DOM does not comply on tht spec regarding this
> > point.  OTOH, the intended behaviour seems a real pain to implement
> > (requires an access to the DTD when using validation, since the
> > required info is not available from a SAX interface)
> 
> A primary problem is that SAX does not suppot reporting whether the
> information came from the DTD or from the document, see
> 
> http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200102/msg00761.html

Yes.  Lack of info from the low-level parsers has always been the problem here 
(we haven't written a dom.ext.readers.Xmlproc yet).

> So it appears that the DOM requires a parser to read the DTD. However,
> they also write
> 
> # XML does not mandate that a non-validating XML processor read and
> # process entity declarations made in the external subset or declared
> # in external parameter entities.
> 
> In turn, I'd say that it is actually a bug in the DOM spec to mandate
> that the specified attribute "works" - it should be a three-state
> value: yes, no, maybe, and Attr nodes for unspecified but defaulted
> attributes should not be mandated.

We complained to www-dom about this years ago, but all the discussion didn't, 
apparently, lead them to reconsider this.  I must confess that I've tended to 
wave off that particular corner of DOM madness since then.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
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