[XML-SIG] Re: Skipped entities under SAX

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Derek Fountain wrote:
> Correct, but is there a reason it chooses to throw an error, rather than hand 
> it over to the handler's skipped entity routine? If it chose the latter, it 
> would obviously skip all entities and hand them all over, but why is that 
> route not preferable to throwing an error and stopping the script?

Yes. The document is ill-formed, as it violates this well-formedness
condition from section 4.1 of XML 1.0:

<quote>
In a document without any DTD, a document with only an internal DTD 
subset which contains no parameter entity references, or a document with 
"standalone='yes'", for an entity reference that does not occur within 
the external subset or a parameter entity, the Name given in the entity 
reference MUST match that in an entity declaration that does not occur 
within the external subset or a parameter entity, except that 
well-formed documents need not declare any of the following entities: 
amp, lt, gt, apos, quot.
</quote>

Your document is without any DTD, so to be well-formed, it must not
contain any entity reference except for the five predefined ones.

According to section 5.1, a processor must report a violation of
a WFC. In SAX, such violations are reported to the error handler,
which defaults to raising an exception.

Regards,
Martin