On Mon, 22 Aug 2005, James M Snell wrote:
Justin Fletcher wrote:
I'm a little confused by all this discussion of never-ending XML documents,
mainly because my understanding is that without the well-formedness checks
the content might as well be free form, and the elements within the
document may rely on parts that have 'yet to arrive'.
Taking as an example the atom:author element, with the above example of a
never-ending document any atom:entry elements which exist would be quite
valid in containing no atom:author element because they're not required to
have one if the atom:feed element contains such an author. And because the
feed has not yet finished the reading application cannot know that the
document is invalid (or not - the atom:author element may arrive at some
point in the future).
If an atom:feed contains an author element, it is required by the spec to
appear before any atom:entry elements in the atom:feed.
(http://www.atompub.org/2005/08/17/draft-ietf-atompub-format-11.html#rfc.section.4.1.1)
so this isn't a problem. Further, the spec really does not define any
metadata that would be dependent on parts yet-to-arrive. There could be a
challenge with same-document links that use fragment identifiers, but that's
about it.
Ah; I misread that in the specification. Thanks. It's just the lack of
well-formedness that is an issue in my head then.
--
Gerph <http://gerph.org/>
... Things get better second time around.
