[XOM-interest] Problem with "Missing scheme in absolute URI reference"
Elliotte Harold
elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Thu Jan 1 12:07:31 EST 2009
Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> I accept this (reluctantly). Could not XOM parse the standalone="yes"
> message and so not pass the DTD address to Xerces?). I still don't
> understand where the error message comes from but it must be somewhere
> in the DTD structure on the W3C pages. I don't understand why a DTD has
> to reference a namespaceURI at all and why the error is generated in the
> way it is. Is Xerces producing a misleading error message? And is the
> W3C spec in error (it validates on their pages) or does Xerces report a
> spurious error?
I still have to look at where that error is coming from. I agree it does
sound misleading.
The problem with standalone='yes' is that there's limited guarantee that
it's accurate. What is a parser/XOM supposed to do when it hits an
undeclared entity reference after not reading the DTD?
Also, standalone='yes' actually has a very technical meaning. In
practice, standalone='yes' is wrong for almost every document with a DTD:
The standalone document declaration MUST have the value "no" if any
external markup declarations contain declarations of:
* attributes with default values, if elements to which these
attributes apply appear in the document without specifications of values
for these attributes, or
* entities (other than amp, lt, gt, apos, quot), if references to
those entities appear in the document, or
* attributes with tokenized types, where the attribute appears in
the document with a value such that normalization will produce a
different value from that which would be produced in the absence of the
declaration, or
* element types with element content, if white space occurs
directly within any instance of those types.
If we were redesigning XML from scratch today, I think the standalone
document declaration would be one of the first things to go (right after
the internal DTD subset).
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Refactoring HTML Just Published!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0321503635/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA
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