Re: well-formedness error

[Simon Fell <soap@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 19:29:25 -0400, in soap you wrote:

>> Aren't you using libraries? Don't they recognise ill-formedness?
>
>I'll answer that: yes; no.  At least not at a macro level (considering 
>the possibility of external encoding information), only on the micro 
>level (considering the XML document in isolation).
>
>As far as I know, NONE of the popular libraries, on all the popular 
>platforms, and in all the popular languages, take RFC 3023 into 
>consideration.  Nor do they provide ANY mechanism for the caller to 
>indicate the "Presence of External Encoding Information" [1].
>
>The way the feed validator accomplishes this function is to actually 
>open the stream, peek at the first few bytes, determine the declared 
>encoding, and actually REPLACE the prolog if necessary to get these to 
>match.
>
>Perhaps somebody out there will know of one or more libraries that 
>actually do provide such support or interface; and if so, I would be 
>interested in hearing about it.  But even if such occurs, this would not 
>change the reality that the overwhelming majority of applications and 
>libraries consider the XML prolog to be authoritative.
>
>- Sam Ruby
>
>[1]<http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006#sec-guessing-with-ext-info>

I remember all this from the early SOAP 1.1 days. (SOAP 1.1 uses
text/xml and so has all these RFC3023 issues). The Expat parser will
allow you to indicate the encoding of the document, irrespective of
what encoding the document claims it is.

Cheers
Simon
www.pocketsoap.com