Re: Validing parser required?

[Sam Ruby <rubys@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bill de hÓra wrote:

> Sam Ruby wrote:
>
> > In the interest of being "cleanly and thoroughly specified", the 
> > AtomPub Working Group should decide whether consumers should be 
> > required to use validating XML parsers in order to consistently and 
> > correctly handle the Atom feed and protocol.
>  > [...]
>
> > The requirement for a DTD was dropped in both the UserLand 0.91 
> > spec[3] (and has not reappeared in subsequent revisions derived from 
> > this spec), nor was is it present in the RSS 1.0 spec[4].
>
> Inline DTDs aside, a DTD for Atom itself doesn't sound feasible given 
> the current spec wording on ordering [1].

There's a difference between "a full and general purpose DTD isn't 
feasible" and "usage of DTDs for specific purposes are not allowed".

An example of an attempt to use a DTD for the purpose of importing a set 
of predefined character references is described here:

http://philringnalda.com/blog/2004/07/ah_sweet_irony.php

I either want to identify this as something that is clearly legal (and 
therefore something a conformance test should be written for), or 
discouraged/illegal (and therefore something that the feedvalidator 
should detect).

- Sam Ruby