From: Jon Hanna (jon@spin.ie)
Date: Tue Aug 12 2003 - 09:59:48 EDT
> Of course one is not required to build an actual DOM tree,
> however XML, HTML
> and alike is now defined in terms of the DOM, where the text/xml syntax is
> just a serialization, which is the only place where whitespaces
> normalization is defined (such normalization does not occur at the DOM
> level, and a XML document may be serialized with another concrete syntax
> than the one assigned to the "text/xml" MIME type, registered and
> documented
> by the W3C.
No.
"XML documents are made up of storage units called entities, which contain
either parsed or unparsed data. Parsed data is made up of characters, some
of which form character data, and some of which form markup. Markup encodes
a description of the document's storage layout and logical structure. XML
provides a mechanism to impose constraints on the storage layout and logical
structure." (XML, Introduction. XML1.1 will not change that).
*XML applications* can be defined in terms of the DOM, but they can also be
defined in terms of the XML Information Set, XPath, by extending one of the
above, or through some other model (e.g. in terms of SAX events). Many
applications are defined in terms of the Information Set or XPath.
None of this actually matters here of course, because there is still no
problem with the use of space and NBSP with combining characters unless you
use that in names or nmtokens.
and whitespace normalization in XML documents
> serialized as "text/xml" is mandatory, or it is not a valid "text/xml"
> serialization.
But it doesn't matter.
> Processing a "text/xml" document in a way that would be incompatible with
> what a DOM tree builder would create is not conforming.
Doesn't matter.
If this is
> different, then it is not XML but a derived language (for example HTML or
> SGML which are using more "relaxed" syntaxes).
XML is derived from SGML, not the other way around. Still doesn't matter.
> If an application does not build the DOM tree, it is still required to
> perform namespace resolution
Namespace resolution, do you mean complying with Namespaces in XML? XML
parsers aren't required to do that, and it still doesn't matter.
> Without DOM interoperability, XML would be another imprecise language like
> HTML,
HTML is pretty precise, most of the imprecision is quite possible in XML as
well. Comparing HTML with XML is a pretty fruitless exercise beyond "oh look
this one has point brackets as well".
Still doesn't matter.
> with very little reusability due to naming conflicts.
Naming conflicts are perfectly possible with XML applications that don't use
Namespaces. Which they are perfectly within the spec in doing, and where
combining diacritics still don't matter.
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