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Re: PaceMustBeWellFormed
In a message dated 7/15/2004 12:11:53 PM GMT Daylight Time, rubys@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Back to the example above. While the current specs may say it is
well-formed, and even proscribe how it should be interpreted, I see a
document that is seriously confused. And I see the relevant draconian
provisions of the XML specification tossing other documents which have
committed significantly lesser infractions involving so-called smart
quotes out on their ear.
So, given that documents such as the above do not tend to appear in
practice (can you give an example?), and have no reason to appear in
practice (any transcoders that understand application/xml had better
understand xml prologs), and that the likelihood that the current
precedence rules will produce the intended result is low (given the way
that modern web servers are configured, if the above data were served
statically, I would tend to trust the document prolog more than the HTTP
headers in this particular circumstance)... given all this, what is my
recommendation?
My recommendation is that the presence of conflicting charset/encoding
information in documents served as application/xml be treated as a
well-formedness error.
It seems to me to risk introducing an unnecessary source of confusion re terminology.
I would suggest that Atom apply, as relevant, the term well-formedness as specified in XML 1.0 (nth Edition) and use another term for situations not covered by the XML 1.0 definition of well-formedness.
Andrew Watt